The Dark Side of the Chinese Dreamhttps://www.thenation.com/article/dark-side-chinese-dream/Rian Thum,Jeffrey WasserstromJul 3, 2018

Donald Trump got one thing right in his campaign: Americans should worry about China. But trade is not the reason. Over the past year, the country has let a Nobel Peace Prize winner die in prison—something that last occurred in the Nazi era. A vast new network of secret extrajudicial internment camps have swallowed up as many as 1 million members of one of the PRC’s minority ethnic groups, the Uyghurs, who are concentrated in the region of Xinjiang and are predominantly Muslim. And, for the first time since Stalin’s day, the head of one of the world’s two biggest economic and military powers has largely secured his ability to rule indefinitely.

Since Beijing has long had a reputation for illiberalism and repression, it would be easy to chalk up these developments as more of the same from a Communist Party that, with the world watching, used tanks and automatic weapons to crush peaceful protests in 1989. But many of the most disturbing developments in Xi Jinping’s China are symptoms of change, not the status quo. When five leading women’s-rights activists were detained in 2015 for organizing much like they had done before, it was news. Today, an individual can be imprisoned for up to three years for showing disrespect toward the national anthem not because of an old law but a new one. It is telling that the law in question will be enforced not just across the mainland but also in Hong Kong, a specially governed region of the country where much more freedom of expression has traditionally been allowed. It is also not business as usual that minority groups in China are now not only being threatened with censure if they disrespect the anthem, but being forced to assemble for flag-raising ceremonies and loyalty pledges.

For those in China who hoped to see room for dissent expand, these shifts show that the bad old things they hoped their country had left behind are still part of its present. Beijing specifically introduced term limits in the 1980s to avoid the leader-for-life pattern of Mao’s time; these have since been jettisoned. An end to reeducation camps was hailed as a sign of progress; now they are back with a vengeance across Xinjiang, a massive territory more than twice the size of Texas.

Wang Dan, the Tiananmen activist who topped the nation’s most-wanted list in 1989, was released on parole in 1993, two years into a four-year sentence. Then, in 1998, he was freed three years into a different 11-year sentence so that he could receive medical treatment abroad. Contrast that with 2010 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo’s fate: prevented from going to the West for treatment after being diagnosed with cancer, and dying while still serving out his own 11-year sentence. His wife, Liu Xia, though charged with no crime, remains under house arrest. This shows that the kind of guilt-by-association common during the Cultural Revolution was not dead, but merely dormant.

One factor that can prevent those outside China from fully appreciating the extent of these changes is that the Communist Party deploys different forms of control in different areas. Hong Kong residents enjoy more freedom than denizens of mainland cities, while some minority regions suffer under what The Economist described as “a police state like no other.” The casual visitor to Shanghai sees neither protests like those in Hong Kong, because they are not allowed, nor the constant military parades, barbed-wire-lined streets, and ubiquitous checkpoints found in Xinjiang.

Paying attention to events in China, even as other world news clamors for attention, is important in part because of Beijing’s newfound economic clout and global power. Xi feels the country’s global position is strong enough that Beijing runs little risk when it scoffs at international-court decisions, as it has when building military bases in the South China Sea, or interns hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs without due process in a manner that meets the definition of a crime against humanity.

Rather than resisting this culture of impunity, the United States has been helping bolster it. Despite worsening human-rights violations in China, influential Americans from the president to the CEOs of Apple and Facebook have been praising Xi’s policies and showing him more deference than they did his predecessors. The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the UN Human Rights Council only validates Beijing’s tendency to flout international norms, as we saw this month when it attempted to gut funding for the UN’s humanitarian programs.

Weaker states and leaders of smaller economies would face grave international consequences for these kinds of actions. But China, much like the United States, now has the power to ignore global opinion and its own legal commitments. This is even easier to do when a distracted world isn’t watching.

In mid-January, when Xi Jinping made his debut at Davos, the head of the Chinese Communist Party and president of the PRC took pains to appear as a self-confident leader determined to guide his country into a high-tech, globally interconnected future. He wanted the world to think that China had put far behind it the century of oppression by foreign powers that preceded the founding of the PRC, during which time, so goes the national myth, the country had been poor, weak, and badly governed. He wanted, too, to show that China had moved on from the ideological upheavals, irrational personality cult, and global isolation that characterized much of the era of rule by Mao Zedong (1949–76). This image of Xi, taken at face value in some international press reports, has stayed in the news via reports of such things as his championing of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, presented as a 21st-century reboot of China’s economic integration with the global community.

Recently, however, we have seen abundant and dispiriting evidence that there is a second, very different Xi to reckon with—one who wants to close off rather than open up China and who heads a government that makes moves eerily reminiscent of those associated with dark parts of the Mao era. Six months after the first Xi made headlines in Davos, this second Xi was refusing the requests of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo to receive life-saving treatments overseas, leaving him to die a prisoner of conscience. The first Xi speaks of global human rights, but the second has overseen an escalation of Internet censorship that has reached new extremes in the wake of Liu’s July 13 death, and, in a throwback to the guilt by blood-and-marriage ties that characterized the Cultural Revolution, he continues to persecute the prisoner-of-conscience’s wife, Liu Xia.

It was also the second Xi who went to Hong Kong at the start of this month to preside over a celebration of the 20th anniversary of the day that Hong Kong transitioned from a British Crown Colony to a Special Administrative Region of the PRC in 1997. The July 1 pageantry was filled with military symbolism, including not just a review of troops but also a visit to the harbor by an aircraft carrier. During his visit, each action and word signaled to residents of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that, in the “One Country, Two Systems” formulation that characterized the 1997 agreement, the former must always trump the latter.

Lest this not be chilling enough to those fighting to preserve the 50 years of autonomy promised in 1997, within two weeks of Xi’s departure, and just one day after Liu Xiaobo’s death, a legal ruling stripped a total of six pro-democracy office holders of their positions in Hong Kong’s legislative council because they had shown insufficient solemnity during their swearing-in ceremony. Two were known for embracing extreme positions, and thus a rejection of their oaths was expected. But the essentially equal judgment passed on four more moderate figures clearly showed that, for this second Xi, there is no gray zone.

For people who teach and write about China for a living, as we both do, the conjuncture of July events has been deeply disturbing. This is not just because of the contrast between the moves the second Xi has been making and the speech he gave six months ago, but also because of the contrast between the hopes of a decade ago and the realities of today.

China in 2007 and in 2017

A decade ago, with the Beijing Olympics on the horizon, it still seemed possible to think that China’s rise in the global economic and diplomatic orders would be accompanied—perhaps with a bit of lag time, but accompanied nonetheless—by the development of a much more open society. In 2007, even those who dismissed as unrealistic—and patronizing—the fantasy that a global “end of history” tide made a multiparty democratic PRC state inevitable found reasons to feel heartened by many trends.

Yes, the Chinese Communist Party, then under the control of the uncharismatic Hu Jintao, was committing appalling human-rights abuses, especially in Tibet and Xinjiang, but in other parts of the country zones of freedom were very gradually expanding. From year to year, academics were able to discuss more issues than they previously could, bookstores could stock a wider range of titles, journalists had more leeway to report, human-rights lawyers were better able to defend their clients, NGOs could operate more effectively.

The mood during the years just before the Olympics were such that Liu Xiaobo, during his last period of freedom between prison terms, could write a blog post early in 2006 that referred to the wonderful possibilities opened up by digital means of organizing and communicating. Room for working within the system seemed possible. The trend lines shifted, though, after the Olympics were celebrated as a success and China’s leaders felt emboldened by their country’s ability to ride out the financial crisis soon that came later in 2008. The final years of Hu’s rule saw moves toward tighter controls, and this new trend accelerated once Xi became head of the Party in 2012 and then president in 2013.

Two Xis, Two Chinas

It is not only Xi that now seems Janus-faced—it is China itself, something that recent events have brought into sharp relief. There is a Closed China and an Open China.

The Open China lost one of its great symbols with the death of Liu Xiaobo. In a moving eulogy to Liu Xiaobo, New Zealand–based scholar Geremie Barmé described him as representing the “other” China—not a controlled state with increasing global clout but a place of possibility, hope, and humanity. He said, echoing a sentiment many Sinologists feel, that he fell in love with that “other” China and is heartened by any signals that it still exists. We each saw proof of the endurance of this “other China” in Hong Kong in 2014, when students and members of other groups took to the streets to demand an electoral system that allowed for more anti-Beijing voices and ultimately defend their right to speak out in ways impossible across the border. We see this “other” China, this Open China, living on when mainland mourners for Liu trade encrypted messages online, dodging censors determined to scrub his presence from cyberspace.

We often see evidence of the Open China in prosaic behaviors. We see it when people on the mainland quietly collect their frustrations with the policies of the second Xi, recording what they see as human-rights abuses in secret files tucked away, hoping and waiting for the day when expressing hope for greater openness will be safe again. Sometimes in recent years the people we have in mind looked to Hong Kong as a beacon, traveling there to buy luxury goods and enjoy the sight of clean streets and gleaming skyscrapers, but also reveling in a space with newspapers that could express dramatically different views on current events. Families took risks to land in Hong Kong’s maternity wards to give their children economic and educational opportunities unavailable on the other side of the border.

Today, however, it is difficult to ignore the fact that Hong Kong’s luster has begun to fade in a China increasingly under the shadow of the second Xi. Many on the mainland now scoff at the idea of Hong Kong superiority. Shanghai’s economy is booming, while Hong Kong’s seems stagnant. Hong Kong boasts the best products the world can buy, but local mainland brands like Huawei, Chinese youths we have met argue, are a match for any on offer in the global marketplace. Even the allure of Internet freedom in Hong Kong seems overrated when China’s WeChat can perform nearly all of the functions of Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp combined and more.

The rift between the Open China and the Closed China, and their respective defenders wherever they are found, yawned wider still in the wake of Hong Kong 2014 umbrella protests. Defenders of the former saw brave people speaking truth to power; those of the latter accepted the contrasting view promulgated by mainland media, which presented the umbrella movement as silly at best, harmful at worst. There were mainland professors who proclaimed Hong Kongers running dogs of the imperial West. Everyday commentators criticized Hong Kong agitators for hurting small businesses.

What Taiwan Can Teach Us About the Two Chinas

The events of July 13 and 14 made for a distressing convergence, but they were followed by an anniversary that reminds us that history can take unexpected turns. July 15 marked the passage of 30 years since a dramatic move toward liberalization and openness took place across the straits from the Chinese mainland on Taiwan. On July 15, 1987, the government of the Republic of China (ROC) lifted nearly four decades of martial law. Established in 1949 and made permanent in 1954, martial-law policies were a hallmark of the rule of over the island of Chiang Kai-Shek, who governed there from the time he began his exile from the mainland until his death in 1975. They embodied his autocratic governing style, which he first demonstrated while controlling the mainland. Under martial law, oppositional political activity was banned, dissidents were jailed, and free speech was stifled. These policies remained in place when Chiang’s son Chiang Ching-kuo succeeded him. But, surprisingly, in the mid-1980s those dissidents with little power under Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime were able to force the hand of this onetime head of the secret police—a background that hardly portends a potential reformer—who subsequently began to soften his father’s stance. The New York Times quoted political opponents to Nationalist rule on that day in 1987: “Political Environment Unclear.”

Sinologists, we should remember, looked at not just the Taiwan side but both sides of the strait with trepidation and anticipation in the mid-1980s, for there were forces working for openness on the mainland as well. Less than two years after the end of martial law, in fact, excitement about Taiwan’s prospects was matched, then exceeded, by the thrill of news of massive demonstrations on the mainland. In late April and early May of 1989, crowds of over a million students and workers, men and women, parents and children flocked to Tiananmen Square to call for the same political freedoms with which the ROC was just beginning to tentatively experiment, and smaller but still massive crowds gathered in the plazas of other cities as well. Few knew which China would ultimately follow the path toward greater openness. Until, that is, the Goddess of Democracy, a symbol of hope for the mainland coming to embody the Open China, was toppled as martial law was declared on the mainland, and the People’s Liberation Army gunned down unarmed demonstrators in Beijing’s June 4 Massacre.

Today it is hard to recapture a sense that it once seemed possible that the mainland, not Taiwan, would exemplify most fully the Open China. The island country now has a robust democracy, while the continental one has taken no steps to introduce elections since the early 1990s. There are other striking contrasts as well. Taiwan has elected its first female president, while China’s highest political body, the Politburo Standing Committee, still has never had a female member. Taiwan’s courts have moved to legalize same-sex marriage, while mainland censors try to erase the presence of LGBTQ citizens from the Internet. Thirty years ago, it seemed entirely possible that it would be Deng’s China, not Chiang’s Taiwan, that would be more of a symbol for liberalization, hard as that can be to remember now.

Wither the Other China?

Some commentators, in an effort to avoid despair in reacting to the darkness of recent events in the PRC, have claimed that the second Xi is moving his country toward a watershed moment that will somehow inevitably galvanize a turn towards global leadership. They ask, “when will China become more like Taiwan?,” implying that familiar Fukuyama end-of-history belief in the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. This seems to us wishful thinking. It ignores many things, including the fact that many on the mainland see Taiwan’s current situation as far from ideal. Where some see achievements in social justice across the strait, nationalists proud of how the Closed China of the second Xi has been rising in the economic as well as geopolitical order see an island losing its allies. Where some see a robust democracy, other see a flagging economy increasingly dependent upon cross-strait trade and a political order marked by squabbles and rowdiness in the legislature. Where some ask, “When will the mainland be more like Taiwan?,” others ask, “Why would we want it to be?”

Recent global events have also been a boon to the second Xi and his supporters, as no China exists within a vacuum. It is not only Hong Kong and Taiwan that can be seen as flawed by many on the mainland—it is the entire Western tradition. Whereas US democracy seems hopelessly deadlocked and unable to pass basic legislation protecting health care and social safety nets, China’s authoritarian system has lifted millions of people out of poverty. And the election of Donald Trump, with his retreat from the global community and his crude, paranoid ways, can makes Xi seem calm and clear-eyed by comparison, especially when he speaks of things such as the need to protect the Paris climate-change accord.

Today it is easy to think that the only choices are to grasp at straws and hope that oppression will inevitably breed resistance, or accept that the second Xi now holds all the cards that matter, especially since he has paid only a small cost for Liu’s death in terms of international blowback. We are aware that many predictions that one or another factor—the coming of the Internet, the expansion of the middle class, the Arab Spring, you name it—would trigger liberalization of the mainland have been proven wrong, but we also see a mix of fragility as well as the obvious strengths in the Closed China of the second Xi. It can be hard to find solace just now, and to speak of signs of imminent change seems to give in to wishful thinking.

Thinking about the resilience of the dream of an Open China, though, we do find some basis for hope in words that the great writer Ursula Le Guin said about a different closed system. In accepting the National Book Award in 2014, Le Guin reminded listeners that, when current political traps seem “inescapable,” they should keep in mind that once “so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” It once seemed foolish to predict that Chiang’s son would begin a process that opened Taiwan. It may be that the human capacity to resist and change will yet surpass our expectations.

This month marks the anniversary of two surges of youth activism in China. One, the May 4 Movement, began with student protests 97 years ago. The other is the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution, which is sometimes said to have begun with the first Red Guards putting up wall posters in late May of 1966. May 4 and Red Guard activists were once seen as part of related movements, but now they tend to be regarded as radically dissimilar.

The former event began with a rowdy May 4, 1919, demonstration in Beijing, during which, among other things, students trashed the houses of officials they despised and one student was injured in a scuffle with police, later dying from his wounds and becoming the struggle’s main martyr. The students who took to the streets were part of a generation fascinated with new ideas and ideologies coming into the country from other parts of the world, from Bolshevism to the democratic liberalism of John Dewey, who happened to arrive in Shanghai to give lectures a few days before the first protests broke out in Beijing. Dewey was brought to Shanghai by progressive intellectuals who had studied with him at Columbia. The May 4 students were also iconoclastic; like the progressive professors and literary figures they admired, they viewed Confucian beliefs and traditions as things that were holding their country and its people back. A third important thing about them was their fierce patriotism.

The May 4 demonstrators took to the streets to denounce warlord rulers whom they viewed as dictatorial, out of step with modern intellectual currents, and far too ready to accede to a plan that the World War I victors were hatching in Paris. This plan, enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles, ceded former German possessions in Shandong Province to Japan rather than returning them to China. Among the student participants in this protest, the professors who encouraged them, and the educated youths who joined follow-up demonstrations in other cities—which drew many workers and members of other groups into the streets as well—were several people who would go on to help found the Chinese Communist Party two years later.

This fact—as well as the success the movement had in achieving some of its goals, such as forcing the ouster of several officials they despised and getting Chinese diplomats to refuse to sign the Treaty of Versailles—helps explain why the CCP would decide in 1939 that the perfect date on which to celebrate “Youth Day” was May 4. It also explains why one of the friezes on a monument in the center of Tiananmen Square devoted to heroes of the Revolution shows a young participant in the May 4 Movement giving a speech, while his male and female classmates distribute pamphlets to a crowd made up of people from different walks of life. And it explains why Communist Party leaders, from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, have all periodically praised the May 4 activists.

The Cultural Revolution is much harder to sum up, so it will be enough here to say a bit about the Red Guards, the most famous—and infamous—group involved in it. These youths were intensely devoted to Mao, who was claiming by 1966 that the sacred revolution he had led was being endangered by the secret machinations of nefarious figures in positions of authority. He accused these people of only pretending to be “red” and patriotic, while really being “capitalist roaders” with bourgeois leanings, “traitors” in league with foreign powers, and “counter-revolutionaries” who had never shaken the hold of “feudal” Confucian ideas. The Red Guards accused administrators at their schools of being “counter-revolutionary” and lashed out at all sorts of real and imagined enemies of the “Great Helmsman” they worshiped, including his onetime heir apparent, Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao claimed was working to undermine his authority and reduce him to a figurehead.

Debates have long raged over how the Cultural Revolution spiraled into violence, involving everything from deadly beatings on campuses to pitched battles between rival groups on the streets of the capital and other cities. There are also conflicting views regarding the motivations, beliefs, activities, and legacies of the youths who got things started, who are the subject of a major new study by sociologist Guobin Yang that Columbia University Press will publish this month: The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China. Among the few things that no one questions about the Red Guards is their devotion to Mao (which made them unlike the May 4 activists, who did not look up to any powerful political figure of their day) and their iconoclastic tendencies and antagonism toward Confucian tradition, which was something that linked them to the young activists of 1919.

The best way to give a sense of how, at one point, the May 4 protesters and Red Guards were seen as cut from the same cloth is to look back to spring 1969, when the People’s Republic of China marked the 50th anniversary of the former movement. The May 5, 1969, issue of Peking Review, the most important Chinese Communist Party English-language magazine of the time, devoted two articles to the events of 1919. The first was a re-publication of “The Orientation of the Youth Movement,” a speech Mao gave in 1939, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the May 4 Movement and the proclamation of the date as Youth Day. The second was “The Jubilee of the May 4 Movement,” which was described as the joint creation of the editorial boards of Renmin ribao (People’s Daily) and two other leading Chinese-language official periodicals. That second article linked the events of 1919 to the accomplishments of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao had recently pronounced a success and declared over (though many now see the chaotic era that began in 1966 as lasting until the Chairman’s death, in 1976).

The central theme of this latter essay was that the “revolutionary youth movement” had achieved great things over the course of half a century. It had done so by moving from strength to strength and being able, in recent decades, to take its cues from Mao’s “brilliant writings” and speeches. The “revolutionary youth movement in China has developed over the last 50 years, from the stage of the new-democratic revolution to the stage of the socialist revolution, and on to the Red Guard Movement during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” the article asserts. “It has played a tremendous role in the history of the Chinese revolution.”

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When did the notion take hold that the May 4 and Red Guard traditions should be seen as radically different, rather than part of the same lineage? It’s hard to say exactly, but by the time I made my first trip to China in 1986, twenty years after the first Red Guard troupes were formed, the ground had shifted dramatically. I arrived in Shanghai that August, to begin research on a dissertation dealing with pre-1949 episodes of youth activism, including both the 1919 protests themselves and later struggles, such as the December 9 Movement of 1935, which were seen at the time and have often been viewed since as part of a continuous and evolving “May 4” tradition.

By December of 1986, Chinese students had once again taken to the streets, calling on the government to move more quickly in the liberalizing direction of “reform and opening up” that Deng Xiaoping had made his watchwords. The youth were influenced by new ideas in the air, such as speeches calling for democracy that the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi had been giving, but they also explicitly rooted their struggle in history. The wall posters I read on campuses that year included calls for the current generation of students to align themselves with the patriotic and anti-autocratic actions of their predecessors in the May 4 and December 9 Movements—the second a particularly resonant event at the time, as official proclamations extolling its virtues and accomplishments had gone up just before the protest surge began.

As 1986 ended and 1987 began, however, and the authorities moved to get the struggle to wind down, a different sort of historical allusion began to appear on the walls of Shanghai campuses: calls for students to take care not to act like the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. The work of administrators and sometimes of conservative members of official student organizations, these notices that referred to protesters as resembling “New Red Guards” had a chilling effect. In this post-Mao period, the Cultural Revolution had come to be seen as a dangerously chaotic period, when youths were misled by their adoration for an aged leader, so to be like Red Guards was to be pulling China backward, not moving it forward, and to be allowing oneself to be hoodwinked as opposed to being independent. This was not how 1986’s protesters wanted to be seen.

This established a pattern that would be repeated during the much larger protest wave of 1989. The students issued one of their most stirring proclamations on the date of the seventieth anniversary of 1919’s first protests. Standing in front of the frieze devoted to the struggle in the heart of Tiananmen Square, they said that a “new May 4 Movement” was needed to get the revolution back on track. Once again, they insisted, China needed to be saved from misgovernment by leaders who were out of touch and autocratic. The government brought up the specter of the Red Guards to counter this, and frequently derided the students for fomenting “chaos,” a term that immediately brings the Cultural Revolution to many minds.

Something similar happened during Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014. The mainland media made much of the fact that one of the few times the city had been hit by protests like these, which were fueled largely by youthful enthusiasm, had been during the Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong had still been a British Crown Colony then, but it had not been immune to protests by local youths loyal to Mao. The Umbrella Movement was as basically peaceful as the 1989 protests on the mainland had been, but this did not stop official media from insisting, as CCP leaders had twenty-five years earlier, that there were youths on the streets acting like Red Guards and causing Cultural Revolution–style turmoil.

Hong Kong protesters did not make as much direct use of May 4 symbolism as the 1989 demonstrators in Beijing and other mainland cities did, in part because they framed their efforts in local terms. They did, however, scoff at the idea that they were reviving Cultural Revolution patterns in much the same way that their Tiananmen predecessors had done a quarter century before. Like mainland students in 1989, the Hong Kong ones of 2014 insisted that they were working to move a place they loved forward, not send it cycling back into the past, so it was completely misguided to tar them with the Red Guard brush.

Ironically, though the Umbrella protesters made fewer allusions to 1919 than the Tiananmen demonstrators did, one key aspect of their struggle made them more like May 4 activists than the 1989 students had been. The Tiananmen protests were about many things, but not about opposition to officials at home who were giving in too easily to demands coming from afar. In 2014, by contrast, when demonstrators derided Hong Kong Chief Executive C.Y. Leung and his allies, they claimed, as May 4 activists had said of the warlords and Chinese representatives at Versailles, that they were not just autocrats but ones too willing to do the bidding of people in a distant capital—this time in Beijing, rather than Europe.

In the era of Xi Jinping, with his fondness for quoting Confucius and warning of the danger of Western ideas, there is no room for commemorating key aspects of the May 4 tradition. It is no surprise, then, that when Youth Day arrived this year, Beijing’s official news agency, Xinhua, blandly described the 1919 protests as being worth remembering because they “inspired the Chinese people to be united and hard-working.” We should also expect to see little public discussion of the Red Guards later this month on the mainland. The Cultural Revolution, long a subject that Chinese leaders seek to handle with care, has become even more of a hot potato now that Xi’s image and writings are getting celebrated in a manner that seems uncomfortably similar at times to how Mao’s were in the 1960s.

We have grown used to Hong Kong being the one place in the People’s Republic of China where 1989’s Tiananmen protests can be publicly marked when the anniversary of the June 4 Massacre arrives each year. We can add to this that Hong Kong is also, despite disturbing recent efforts by Beijing to stifle its special public sphere, the one part of the PRC where frank public discussion of the Cultural Revolution’s legacy is possible on the fiftieth anniversary of the Red Guards’ first actions. It is also, importantly, the only place where the true spirit of May 4 is being kept alive by youths who combine openness to the best ideas coming from all corners of the globe with a determination to protect the political community they love.

Last week at Hong Kong’s Chinese University, a crowd gathered around a replica of the statue Goddess of Democracy, a key symbol of the 1989 student occupation of Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Beneath hand-lettered banners calling on fellow students to “shoulder their historic mission,” several generations of student union presidents discussed a proposal to boycott classes, a measure adopted by a federation of Hong Kong students over the weekend and slated to begin on September 22. The student boycott supports a wider democracy movement; as a leaflet circulating yesterday (September 10) explained, it is a “prelude to a student civil disobedience move…that will lead various social groups to their own civil disobedience movement, together opposing unjust political power.” Activists and scholars alike are calling this moment a watershed for the future of Hong Kong, and indeed, for the politics of China itself. As an American-based scholar of Chinese student movements and an historian teaching at Chinese University, we too view events in Hong Kong—the former British colony that became part of the PRC in 1997—at a crossroads. As we consider the protests’ significance, it is worth considering the historical analogies at play in Chinese politics, and which revolutions from China’s past might illuminate the way forward.

At the heart of the current controversy is the contested future of democracy in Hong Kong. When Hong Kong reverted to mainland Chinese rule in 1997, the premise of the Basic Law agreement was that Beijing would allow its population to maintain its political system, which had incorporated some electoral democracy in the late years of British rule. Since the handover, the chief executive—as the pre-eminent Hong Kong official is known—has been chosen by committee, and this process has resulted in business-friendly leaders who support Beijing. In the next election of the Chief Executive in 2017, pro-democracy activists have called for direct elections. On August 31, Beijing decided to define the call for universal suffrage in its own way: elections for the next chief executive will be by “one person, one vote,” but the candidates will be vetted by Beijing. What’s more, the Communist Party’s official People’s Daily has attempted to portray the pro-democracy movement in general, and the militant wing within it, known as “Occupy Central,” in particular, as controlled by “external forces,” saying the struggle threatens to create “chaos” and undermine economic stability.

In the wake of Beijing’s decision, Hong Kong students are planning a class boycott meant to precede demonstrations by Occupy Central that will block the streets in Hong Kong’s main business district. The grievances of Occupy Central have much in common with those of Occupy movements worldwide: Hong Kong is a vastly unequal society, and government policies are seen as favoring real estate development over affordable housing, shopping complexes over little remaining farmland, and low taxation over more equitable redistribution. One prominent Chinese academic, Wang Zhenmin, explained restrictions on elections by saying that the Communist Party must protect rich people in the interests of continued capitalism in Hong Kong. But while acknowledging that unfettered economic development—in both Hong Kong and China—has led to extreme inequalities rivaling those in the United States, Occupy Central, unlike some related movements, has made its main goal altering electoral procedures.

The most obvious historical analogy for recent Hong Kong events is the 1989 Tiananmen student-led movement, whose icon the Chinese University students chose as the backdrop for launching their own strike. In mainland China, the event still cannot be discussed openly or included in textbooks, but it is commemorated with public mourning ceremonies in Hong Kong each year. It was in the aftermath of Tiananmen that Hong Kong was returned to mainland control. At that moment it was hoped that the former colony’s democratic experience might provide an example for China’s own political reform. Now as the Communist Party calls for stability and accuses Occupy Central of foreign manipulation, the echoes of Tiananmen loom large: Voice of America reports that Beijing’s Hong Kong decision reflects the Communist Party’s internal insecurities. From his Facebook page, former Tiananmen student leader Wang Dan urges Hong Kong students to strike. The sighting of armored personnel carriers, of the sort used in Beijing in 1989, has caused rumors to fly that perhaps the military will use force to quell protests. An open letter by Occupy Central supporters to Chinese President Xi Jinping is even more explicit, “Don’t stage another Tiananmen crackdown in Hong Kong. The whole world is watching.”

But we hear louder echoes of protest movements that predate 1989, ones in which the Communist Party was among the groups supporting demands for democracy. In the colonial Hong Kong of 1967, labor disputes led to months of anti-British demonstrations. Communist groups and leftist sympathizers shouted Maoist slogans, blocked traffic and plastered government buildings with posters denouncing colonial oppression and police brutality. Demanding the release of arrested protesters, then-Premier Zhou Enlai declared from Beijing that “the destiny of Hong Kong will be decided by our patriotic countrymen in Hong Kong.” At that time it was the British who spoke the language of power, emphasizing “law and order,” insisting that Hong Kong residents wanted nothing but economic stability, and calling the protesters a “small number of misguided fanatics.” With the tables now turned on Beijing, it is no wonder that some locals insist that 1997 merely saw control of Hong Kong handed from one foreign capital to another.

There are also parallels between today’s Hong Kong and Shanghai before the PRC was founded in 1949. For example, after this year’s July 1 pro-democracy march, a pro-stability march was staged in which groups from the mainland were allegedly offered food and money in exchange for participation. Similarly, in Shanghai after World War II—a city then governed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government—Communist Party and other opposition groups demonstrated against corruption and authoritarianism, only to have the Nationalists hold rent-a-crowd rallies decrying the protests as the work of outside agitators. And even before the Nationalist government came to power, in the May 30th Movement of 1925, Communists and Nationalists both protested against British control of Shanghai’s foreign-run International Settlement. Here, too, one of the demands was expanding suffrage in the settlement, where only foreigners could vote and stand for office in the Municipal Council. In the Communist Party’s approved official histories, movements like May 30th are hailed as milestones in anticolonial nationalism, and their popular support evidence that the Party came to power backed by the people.

Ironically, two years ago in Hong Kong, protestors successfully fought plans to incorporate Beijing-approved “patriotic education” into its school system—a victory referred to in the Federation of Students leaflet mentioned above. Yet now Hong Kongers plan to take to the streets not unlike China’s pre-1949 textbook heroes: nationalists against British imperialism, patriots against Chiang Kai-shek’s corruption and authoritarianism, and democrats for equal representation. In the face of this Beijing’s Communist Party rulers have come full circle. Now they are the ones whose mantra is stability, who say business must be protected, and who talk of foreign conspiracies.

Historical analogies matter in many political settings, but there are special resonances to them in Hong Kong and China, especially when linked to actions by students. In imperial times, Chinese scholars—and students are seen as belonging to this category—were seen as having a special duty to serve as the conscience of the polity, speaking out when rulers lost their moral compass. And over the course of the twentieth century, students continually played central roles in spearheading nationalist struggles, including the May 30th Movement and earlier and later protests, that are as famous within Chinese patriotic mythology as the Boston Tea Party and Paul Revere’s ride are in the American one. Thus when the deputy of Hong Kong’s Federation of Students, Lester Shum, refutes the idea that students are being manipulated by outsiders, the Tiananmen students’ assertion that they were patriotic—twenty-five years ago—springs immediately to mind, as do memories of earlier struggles when educated youth served political vanguard roles. Likewise, Occupy Central’s open letter to President Xi Jinping anticipates that the party will once again reach for its traditional source of power, the barrel of a gun.

As historians of China’s revolutions, we suggest that the Tiananmen analogy is powerful, but it is not the only or even the best one to keep in mind. To draw solely upon this one historical example, linked to a tragedy, is to take a fatalistic view, that the student boycott and the Occupy Central movement are already doomed. We should make room as well for other moments in history—as students themselves now do.

For example, consider two of the stories that former student leaders told the latest generation of activists who gathered around the Goddess of Democracy last week—stories that referred first to the New Culture Movement of 1915–23 (which called for enlightenment through science and democracy) and then to the May Fourth Movement of 1919 (a related wave of anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian protests). Chong Chi-keung, student union president of 1987, spoke of a house whose sleeping occupants were unaware of a fire. Wong Weng Chi, president of 2007, invoked the spirit of May Fourth, arguing that only through mass movements could society be changed. Until now, Wong reflected, China has science but it doesn’t have democracy. These are two stories that every Chinese schoolboy knows: the former is of Lu Xun the leftist writer, calling for political awaking; the latter refers to a protest that marked the birth of modern Chinese nationalism.

The analogies suggested by the Hong Kong students themselves show that the “historic mission” to be shouldered is not that of Tiananmen but of May Fourth, a democratic and patriotic protest that preceded the founding of the Communist Party and whose ideals remain incomplete. Today’s Communist Party, contrary both to its early history and its textbook history, does not wear May Fourth’s mantle. Instead, in the name of social change, Hong Kong’s students declare that it is theirs, while the Communist Party acts and speaks in ways that bring its pre-1949 authoritarian opponents to mind—an irony of which local activists are well aware. For example, when pro-Beijing forces in Hong Kong began calling on students to snitch on classmates who supported going on strike, democracy activists labeled this a “white terror” tactic, using a term that Communist Party textbooks employ to condemn brutal tactics that Chiang Kai-shek wielded when the Nationalists were in power before 1949.

The students who have been gathering in the shade of the Goddess of Democracy and invoking the May Fourth tradition do not know what the future will hold, any more than did the students of 1919, who achieved key demands in the end, such as the dismissal of three particularly despised officials. If the outcome is uncertain, though, the importance of the movement and the need to pay attention to how it develops is clear. Ever since 1997, Hong Kong struggles have been significant not only to local actors but also to those on the mainland wondering if moves toward democratization could be in their future. To them, the determination that Hong Kongers have shown in recent years to wrest the democracy they have been promised from the Communist Party has often been inspiring. All the same, moves by Beijing to control future elections has surely had a chilling effect.

AP ImagesA Chinese protestor blocks a line of tanks heading east on Beijing’s Cangan Blvd. June 5, 1989 in front of the Beijing Hotel.

In April and May of 1989, people around the world were inspired by the protests in Tiananmen Square, then horrified when the June 4 massacre turned Beijing streets into urban killing fields. China has changed enormously in the twenty years since then, but the Communist Party’s attitude toward 1989 has remained constant. It insists there were no peaceful protests and no “massacre,” just “counterrevolutionary riots” that were pacified by soldiers who showed great restraint. It refuses to acknowledge the losses to relatives of the hundreds of victims, tries to keep young Chinese ignorant of what happened and encourages specialists in the West to stop dwelling on 1989.

This approach is part of a larger effort to change the image of the party, so that mention of its name does not bring to mind visions of the Red Guard of the 1960s, anti-Confucian rallies of the ’70s or the iconic picture of the lone man confronting a line of tanks. Instead, party leaders would like it to be associated with skyscrapers, sleek department stores and refurbished Confucian temples. These pictures fit in better with the party’s view of itself as a pragmatic organization that has moved China forward while honoring traditions, transformed cities into showplaces of modernity and raised the nation’s international status and living standards. The 2008 Olympics, seen in this light, was the most expensive rebranding campaign in world history.

The regime’s approach to 1989 is open to criticism on moral grounds. It is wrong to claim that the only martyrs of June 4 were a handful of soldiers attacked by crowds. And it is cruel to keep parents of victims from publicly mourning.

The party’s version of post-1989 history can also be challenged. Consider, for example, how Perry Link, a leading China specialist, ends his May 17 Washington Post review of Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, the newly released posthumous memoir of the former party leader who was placed under house arrest for opposing the use of force in 1989. China’s rulers “claim they have lifted millions from poverty,” Link writes, “but in truth the millions have lifted themselves, through hard work and long hours, and in the process have catapulted the elite to unprecedented levels of opulence and economic power.” Rejecting the notion that today’s leaders are popular and firmly in control, he closes with this metaphor: “The seal continues to straddle the ball–insecure as ever, but still definitely on top.”

These sentences are beautifully wrought. And though I think Link’s circus analogy is misleading, I agree with his oft-stated insistence that China specialists need to resist the temptation to put 1989 behind us.

One reason to keep dwelling on 1989 is that common misunderstandings about that year persist, in China and in the West. For example, many Americans still think protesting students were the main victims of the massacre, even though the majority of the dead were workers who had turned out to support the educated youths. Many Americans also misremember those students as people who wanted to bring Western-style democracy to China. The reality was much more complex.

The students did celebrate the virtues of minzhu (democracy), but they spent even more energy denouncing corruption. And while their outlook was cosmopolitan, they were intensely patriotic. They presented themselves as carrying forward a longstanding Chinese tradition: that of intellectuals speaking out against selfish officials whose actions were harming the nation. In addition, the students’ grievances were not all purely political. They complained about the party’s interferences in their private lives and about its failure to make good on economic promises (Wuer Kaixi, a leader of the student movement, noted that a desire to be able to buy Nike shoes and other consumer goods was among the things that inspired members of his generation to act).

China specialists have another reason to revisit 1989: to stay humble. We pride ourselves on our deep understanding of China, but each of us was surprised by what happened twenty years ago–if not by the fact that a massacre occurred then by how long it took for the tanks to roll; if not by how many people risked their lives to fight for change then by the role rock music played in the protests.

It’s also humbling to realize how often post-Tiananmen events have defied our predictions. More than a few observers assumed two decades ago that the Chinese Communist Party would soon go the way of its counterpart in Poland, where Solidarity won a major election on the very day of the massacre. Later, some of us were sure that to survive, the party would either pull back from engaging with the world or reverse the verdict on 1989.

China’s rulers have instead combined rigidity about Tiananmen with startling flexibility on other fronts. To minimize the likelihood of a recurrence of 1989 and avoid succumbing to what some Chinese leaders call the “Polish disease” (a Solidarity-like movement), the party has encouraged consumerism (many youths can now buy those Nikes), pulled back from micromanaging campus life (today’s students have much more personal freedom than their predecessors) and tried to leap ahead and steer new outbursts of nationalism. It has also treated different kinds of protests in varying ways, using draconian measures to stop any struggle that seems highly organized or that could link people of different classes but showing leniency toward some single-class, single-locale actions. And while dissidents have found exciting uses for new technologies like the Internet and text-messaging, the regime has also proved adept at using these media to discourage protests, disseminate its own interpretations of events and get supporters onto the streets.

How long can the regime keep expressions of discontent from snowballing again into something that threatens its power? This remains an open question, especially in light of the global economic downturn, which has not hit China as hard as it has many other countries but has led to a staggering number of factory closings and prompted an urban-to-rural migration of many workers who are not happy to be heading home. This is a phenomenon to watch, since economic frustrations were a crucial spur to action in 1989 and are likely to figure centrally in the next big challenge the leadership faces from below.

For now, though, the long series of high-growth years provides the regime with a buffer, allowing many who are struggling to think they could do well in the future. The party’s real difficulties will come when the memory of the recent upward surge has receded and a broad cross-section of people who have been left behind start to lose hope of prosperous times ahead. This is bound to happen eventually, but not yet. And we should not underestimate the ability of this regime, which has been so effective at defying the odds, to further delay its long-predicted demise.

This is why I think that Perry Link has not quite hit the mark with his image of a seal balancing on a ball. This suggests a performance involving just one trick, whereas China’s leaders are continually improvising. The circus act they bring to mind is not a seal but a juggler–the sort who somehow manages to keep a dizzying number of balls in the air, even when new objects are tossed into the rotation.

If you’d asked me this question a year ago, my answer would have pivoted around the fact that several important round-number anniversaries will occur in a place where such dates often have great political currency. I’d have mentioned that the May 4th Movement, the first in what would become a long line of large-scale, student-led patriotic outbursts, took place in 1919. The People’s Republic was founded on October 1, 1949. The biggest Tibetan Uprising began on March 10, 1959. Finally, the Tiananmen protests started in mid-April of 1989 and ended with that year’s June 4 Massacre.

I’d have suggested that, in light of this, there was a good chance that one or more of the following six things would occur in 2009:

• Tibetans would take to the streets.

• There’d be a surge of youth activism focusing on protecting the nation.

• More demonstrations than usual would occur in cities, especially if the economy was as troubled as it had been in 1989, a time of inflation and rising unemployment.

• Dissidents would issue dramatic statements about the need for political reform, in an effort to reopen debates that had largely been tabled since 1989.

• Subtler moves in this direction would be made, such as calling for a reassessment of Zhao Ziyang, the top official purged in 1989 for taking too soft a line on protests.

• The government would detain gadfly figures, such as Tiananmen vet Liu Xiaobo, during the lead up to celebrations of the People’s Republic turning sixty.

But something strange happened during 2008. Each of the potential 2009 developments cited above happened ahead of time.

• In March, Tibet was rocked by unrest.

• Throughout the spring, there were expressions of nationalist fervor.

• In September, the envelope-pushing magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu (Annals of the Yellow Emperor) published a piece that used daringly respectful language when referring to Zhao Ziyang.

• In November, due partly to the global economic downturn, a rowdy series of strikes, mostly involving taxi drivers, swept through Chinese cities.

• In December, a group of Chinese intellectuals, including Liu Xiaobo, issued Charter 08, a bold call for political reform. That same month, Liu was detained.

Two main points are worth making about all this.

First, it doesn’t undermine the notion that tracking anniversaries is important. After all, many of the 2008 events mentioned above had some kind of tie to an anniversary–just not a 2009 one.

The timing of the Lhasa riots, for example, coincided with the March 10 date–just the forty-ninth rather than fiftieth one. Charter 08 was issued to mark an anniversary–the sixtieth anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights rather than the twentieth anniversay of the June 4 Massacre. And the crackdown involving Liu’s detention was launched when the Communist Party was gearing up to celebrate a birthday–just the thirtieth of the start of the Reform era rather than the sixtieth of the Communist period.

Second, the 2008 arrival of things that seemed to be on the horizon for 2009 somehow fits with the mood of how things have been going in China. Ever since giant countdown clocks began appearing in Chinese cities in the mid-1990s, ticking off the seconds until Hong Kong “returned to the embrace of the ancestral homeland,” China has seemed a country that, for better and for worse, has been stuck in fast-forward mode. Chinese leaders have promoted this image of the country, and outsiders have embraced or feared but not dismissed this notion.

Evidence of this phenomenon takes many forms.

There are, for example, the Beijing and Shanghai museums that present the rapidly changing urban landscapes of these cities not as they are but as they will be in 2010 or 2020. And there are the new countdown clocks that have gone up since the 1997 Hong Kong handover ones reached zero. Like those that until recently encouraged people in Beijing to focus on the upcoming start of the Olympics on 08/08/08, and those that now remind people in Shanghai that in less than 500 days the city will play host to China’s First World’s Fair, the 2010 World Expo.

The same impatient mindset has also shown through in the marketing and international consumption of “farewell cruises” down the Yangzi River. These played to what might be called anticipatory nostalgia. Foreign and domestic tourists alike gazed keenly at villages that would have been far less interesting to them, had they not been so intensely aware that the Three Gorges Dam project would soon lead to the complete submersion of all the fields and houses they were seeing.

Even during the Olympics, there was sometimes a sense of things happening before they were supposed to. This was not just because some of the sights and sounds of the 08/08/08 Opening Ceremony turned out to have been pre-recorded, but also because, after years of advance speculation about whether protests would erupt during the Olympics, the most notable acts of disruption turned out to be those that took place during the pre-games torch relay.

In other words, perhaps we shouldn’t have been surprised to see China’s 2009 start while the calendar still read 2008. Many of the cascading traumas, tragedies and triumphs of China’s Year of the Olympics were certainly unexpected, but we should probably begin to take it in stride when things happen ahead of schedule in the PRC–and be ready for more developments that, for better or worse, jump the gun during China’s Year of Anniversaries.

China specialists make a parlor game of imagining what Mao Zedong would make of the People’s Republic of China today, with its capitalist-friendly Communists and young people more familiar with the theme song from Titanic than The East is Red.

In China’s Brave New World, for example, I ruminate on a revivified Mao’s likely response to my favorite Nanjing bookstore, where the philosophy section has nary a copy of his Little Red Book, but does contain Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy and studies of abstruse French theory, like the optimistically titled Understanding Foucault. Some of my colleagues have taken this motif a step further, bringing into the mix the Chairman’s arch-rival, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, who died in exile on a Nationalist Party-run Taiwan that was both capitalist and authoritarian. In Modern China: A Very Short Introduction, for instance, Oxford historian Rana Mitter writes: “One can imagine Chiang Kaishek’s ghost wandering around China today nodding in approval, while Mao’s ghost follows behind him, moaning at the destruction of his vision.”

If the Olympics mark a turning point in the history of the PRC, isn’t it time to play this game with the games? What would Chairman Mao and Generalissimo Chiang make of the Beijing that has played host to athletes, journalists, fans and political leaders? How would the opening ceremonies have struck them? What about the media coverage and sporting events that followed?

Let’s start with the ghosts of two competitors arriving in a pre-games Beijing. Much about the look of the city would shock them, since neither had governed a metropolis with skyscrapers and mega-malls. News that the metropolis was gearing up to host the Olympics would surely be a welcome surprise. Both Mao and Chiang had long lamented the fact that China of the early 1900s was derided as the “sick man of Asia,” a play on earlier Western references to the Ottoman Empire in Europe–each a once-proud place that now could be bullied. Both leaders stressed the importance of exercise, insisting that China’s lack of a strong tradition of vigorous sports had contributed to it being laid low by Western and then Japanese imperialism. The dream of China hosting the games dates back to the early 1900s, so each leader would be pleased this longtime wish had been granted.

Once the ghosts got their bearings, their reactions to Beijing would begin to diverge. Mao would be delighted to see his face on most currency, but maybe a bit put off by the fact that some new banknotes feature the Bird’s Nest Stadium instead. And he’d be pleased to see that a giant portrait of his face still looks down on Tiananmen Square. These same things would infuriate the Generalissimo.

As a Christian who had made the birthday of Confucius an official holiday during the Nationalist period (1927-1949), the religious situation would be somewhat gratifying to the Generalissimo and annoying to the Chairman. It is true that the only Christian churches offering services now are carefully selected officially sanctioned ones, like that recently visited by “Xiao Bushi” (Little Bush, as George W. is sometimes called to distinguish him from his father). The unofficial but increasingly popular “house churches” remain illegal. Still, the situation is quite different than it was on the mainland late in Mao’s life, when all manifestations of Christian belief were driven underground.

As for Confucius, reviled by Mao as a feudal thinker, temples devoted to the Sage that were destroyed by Red Guards have been refurbished and new statues honoring him have been installed. Seeing such objects erected in the kinds of places where statues of Mao himself once stood (though there are still plenty of those around, too) would be hard for the Chairman’s ghost to take.

The prominence of Confucius in the Olympics opening ceremonies is also relevant. He was invoked early on in the show, via a famous quotation of the Sage’s about the pleasure of having “friends come from afar” and a contingent of performers dressed as his disciples. This would have been a source of comfort to the Generalissimo’s ghost, an outrage to Mao’s. If any ancient figure deserved to be celebrated, according to the Chairman, it was the First Emperor of the Qin, known for, among other things, his disdain for Confucian scholars and their books.

Neither ghost would have minded seeing those segments of the ceremonies that Western commentators have criticized as evocative of Nazi or North Korean rituals. The Generalissimo fought the Axis powers during World War II, but he was drawn at times to fascism; the Chairman and North Korea’s leaders often had similar approaches to spectacle. Moreover, both Mao and Chiang presided over National Day parades on their respective sides of the Taiwan straits that involved large numbers of people moving together in lock-step.

What would have disturbed both was the quick march through China’s history, in which director Zhang Yimou skipped straight from the Ming Dynasty, represented by the giant ships of explorer Zheng He, to the late 1970s. This made it seem as if the anti-dynastic 1911 Revolution of Sun Yat-sen, the Japanese invasions of the 1930s (that both Mao and Chiang resisted), the Long March (that saved the Communist Party from extinction at the hands of the Nationalists) and the period from 1949 to the mid-1970s when Mao ruled the mainland (and Chiang ruled Taiwain) had never happened. The events of the twentieth century were of epic importance for China; to see most of it airbrushed out of the Olympic gala would disturb not only to the ghosts, but all who understand the dangers of a selective telling of history.

Moving forward to the sporting events, there are four things worth noting, especially relating to Mao’s ghost:

He would’ve liked seeing China besting America in the collection of a valuable kind of mineral. The disastrous Great Leap Forward he launched, which contributed to a famine with a staggeringly high death toll, was aimed, after all, at catching up with and ultimately surpassing Western countries in steel production.

We should remember that Mao touted the importance of female equality, via slogans such as “women hold up half the sky” and the introduction of a new, much fairer Marriage Law in 1950. As such, surely his ghost would have taken pleasure in success of China’s female athletes.

As someone famed for his swims in the Yangzi River, Mao might have been delighted by the aquatic stadium and swimming and diving events. But he did value a governing party’s ability to control the news and give it a nationalistic spin–something that Chiang, also no slouch as a proponent of censorship, prized as well. And so, Mao’s ghost would have understood why the exploits of domestic athletes got more attention than did those of Michael Phelps on Chinese television.

Most significantly, Mao’s ghost would surely have been pleased to learn that, while athletes based on Taiwan can still compete as their own team, they cannot use their national flag or have their national anthem played during the games. This is just one of many aspects of Beijing in 2008 that shows the degree to which it is the Communist Party’s spin on the “one China” theme, not the Nationalist Party’s one, that remains dominant.

In the end, then, Mao would be the one most satisfied by the games. Geremie Barme, an Australian Sinologist who is a leading authority on both Mao and Chinese film, argues that there were subtle ways that the opening ceremonies invoked the Chairman. He notes that director Zhang Yimou took one of the Chairman’s watchwords (“using the past to serve the present and the foreign to serve China”) as his guide throughout.

This is doubtless true, but there is nothing subtle about some aspects of the games that would have pleased the Chairman, including the makeup of the crowd. After being humiliated on 1950s trips to Moscow, forced to play supplicating “little brother” to patronizing Soviet leaders, Mao was eager to see a day when foreign heads of great powers would come to Beijing on Beijing’s own terms. So Mao’s ghost would surely have liked the sight of Putin and Bush sitting in a Chinese stadium awash with red PRC flags, watching a spectacle that most foreigners found impressive, even if at times also a bit disturbing. And as Barme reminds us, though there were allusions to Confucius in the show, many of the choreographers and performers responsible for it were from an organization that was always very dear to Mao: the People’s Liberation Army, which he had once led into battle and ultimately led to victory over the forces of Chiang’s Nationalist Party.

Beijing, Beijing: never has this city made so many headlines. Never have so many reviews of books about it, photos of its landmarks, and tips on where to eat and what to see if you go there shown up in English-language publications. If the Olympic Games accomplish nothing else, they will at least ensure that news broadcasters around the world can all find Beijing on a map and pronounce its name correctly, so that references to the anachronistic “Peking” will be consigned to puns in book titles and references to culinary delights, such as the city’s storied duck dish.

This explosion of Beijing commentary is natural. And we’ve done our small part to contribute to it, via our individual writings for The China Beat blog and other venues, where we’ve talked up new books with titles like Beijing Time and The Last Days of Old Beijing. Still, as central as Beijing is to the tale of the games, it is a mistake to focus too intently on this one Chinese metropolis. Most of the main news stories relating to the games–from how China got the nod to host, to the event’s political and economic dimensions–are better appreciated when viewed through a multi-city or national lens than solely through the prism of Beijing.

The most important reason to look beyond Beijing is simple: the Chinese regime realized from the start that domestically, the games cannot achieve what it wants them to achieve if they are seen as a just the capital’s affair. It has thus taken many steps to encourage people living far from Beijing–who often view the capital and its residents with suspicion–to feel that they, too, have a stake in and can benefit from the Olympics. Consider the torch relay. International audiences tended to lose interest in it after the flame reached China, perking up again only when it made it to Tibet and then this week the capital, but its passage through Hainan Island and cities such as Fujian and provinces such as Anhui–none of which is near Beijing or Lhasa–were crucial for a government that is constantly trying to convince a population with no faith in its official ideology to give it credit for providing attractive bread and circuses at home and for raising China’s profile abroad.

Since most foreign journalists are based in Beijing, people-in-the-street interviews conducted there will be used to assess the domestic success of the games (or lack thereof). But for the Communist Party, what counts just as much as reactions by Beijingers is how the spectacle plays in places like Wuxi and Wenzhou, which we might be tempted to call Peorias with Chinese characteristics, except that the population of the former is almost ten times and the latter almost twenty times that of the Illinois city.

Here are some specific stories that benefit from looking beyond Beijing.

Why China Got the games

When IOC members vote on host cities, they typically weigh the merits of a specific metropolis and a specific country. If nations have hosted the games before, the suitability of a particular city may be particularly important. With first-time hosts like China, though, the vote is more of referendum on the country. And while the decision-making of individual IOC voters is shrouded in secrecy, there are good reasons to assume that in 2001, they were influenced by developments in multiple Chinese cities. For example, when Chinese officials claimed they could quickly transform their then dowdy-looking capital, improving its transportation infrastructure and working with international architecture firms to create stunning new buildings, this notion was given added credence by the spectacular way Pudong (East Shanghai) had evolved from a backwater to a glittering showplace during the 1990s. And when these same officials promised that they could deliver increased press freedom, the degree of media openness in Hong Kong in the immediate aftermath of the 1997 handover gave a degree of plausibility to this notion.

The Athletic Contests

Events will be taking place in multiple cities. Beijing will get the most action, but competitions will take place elsewhere: yachting in Qingdao, soccer matches in Shanghai, Tianjin, Qinhuangdao, and Shenyang, and equestrian events in Hong Kong. Lest anyone think that these events will still be basically “local” to Beijing (analogous to some contests at the Atlanta Games being farmed out to other parts of Georgia), note that while Tianjin is a neighbor of the capital and Qinhuangdao is only about 180 miles from it, Shenyang is more than 400 miles to the north, and Hong Kong more than three times that far to the south (further from Beijing than Atlanta is from Manhattan).

Architecture

Beijing has gone all out architecturally for the Olympics, with the construction of the Bird’s Nest (National Stadium), the Water Cube (National Aquatics Center) and a fancy new airport terminal. But this monumental urge neither started in Beijing (Shanghai got its urban makeover and a state-of-the-art new airport first), nor is now limited to the capital. Some of the construction money earmarked for the games is being spread around, as lavish new arenas have been built in secondary host cities like Tianjin. And Shanghai’s built environment continues to be transformed, often through the sort of splashy joint ventures of foreign and Chinese architects that are getting so much attention just now in Beijing. Not long after the Bird’s Nest was completed, for example, the World Financial Center in Pudong became the tallest skyscraper on earth.

Spectacle and Symbolism

Much has been made of how the symbolic layout of the capital has been altered by the games, and global television broadcasts of the lead-up have continually used spectacular shots of sites that are in or near Beijing, from Tiananmen Square to the Great Wall, to stand for China. Within China itself, though, efforts have been made to use more geographically diffuse symbols and spectacles to represent the nation. Consider, for instance, the mascots for the games, the cuddly fuwa or “Five Friendlies” that have been marketed heavily in China for the past few years. Created to be broadly representative of varied regions and ethnic groups within the nearly continent-size land mass that is the Peoples Republic of China, the bobble-headed imps are featured on all kinds of Olympic paraphernalia (available at Olympic stands erected on city street corners and in empty storefronts across China). They are often shown participating in Olympic events, from diving to badminton to wrestling (our personal favorites include the image of pudgy panda Jingjing, handgun cocked, participating in the pistol-shooting events).

Jingjing is an emblem for Sichuan, the antelope Yingying represents the Tibetan and Xinjiang minorities, and so on. To turn the fuwa‘s diversity into a message of saccharine greeting, while suggesting that the country’s people all come together in the capital (a theme likely to be stressed in the Opening Ceremonies as well), the names of the Friendlies spell out “Beijing Welcomes You.” Often mocked on the web and elsewhere, some have said that rather than being representative of positive Chinese attributes the Friendlies have been harbingers of 2008’s bad luck, from Sichuan’s earthquake to the Tibetan unrest.

After the games

One likely assumption is that when it comes to future high-profile international gatherings, the main Chinese city to benefit or be hurt by how the games play out will be Beijing. This is partly true. There is talk already of the city wanting to host the World Cup soon, and this will likely only come to pass if the games go well.

Here again, though, there’s a beyond-Beijing angle worth appreciating. The capital has never been the only city in the mix: Shanghai hosted a major summit in October 2001 that brought George W. Bush, among many other leaders, to Pudong, for example; and Kunming was supposed to host a world anthropology conference earlier this year–but the conference was cancelled due partly to official worries about something untoward happening that would affect the games. And where high-profile events are concerned, Beijing will not even be the main Chinese city to focus on during the two years following the end of the games. Why? Because 2010 will be the year of the Shanghai World Expo.

World Expos are still a very big deal in Asia, and this event is billed as the first World’s Fair ever held in the developing world. It is being touted as an “Economic Olympics” (one more strategy for ensuring that Olympic fever isn’t seen as a purely Beijing thing), and estimated to have the potential of bringing 70 million tourists to Shanghai. One reason residents of cities other than Beijing have a stake in how the games go is that the Olympics will influence the fate of their bids to host future events.

Efforts to use the games to knit the Chinese nation together appear to have been successful, so far–certainly more successful than efforts to use the events to improve Western views of the regime. The recent leg of the torch run through earthquake-damaged Sichuan, the torch’s final jaunt before arriving in Beijing, was heralded nationwide, its appearance combined with moments of silence in memory of the earthquake’s victims. And in the next week or so, we’ll see further uses of the games to promote national unity. The equestrian events taking place in Hong Kong, for example, could help solidify the former British colony’s incorporation into the PRC.

But not all of these attempts to use this international spectacle to further national ends have worked out as planned. For instance, when the torch run’s path was initially announced, it included a stop in Taiwan–between legs in Vietnam and Hong Kong. The plans sparked accusations from Taiwan that China was using the run to prove that Taiwan was part of the PRC and, despite talks that continued through the summer, the torch eventually bypassed Taiwan. Still, on the whole, the domestic lead-up to the games, even in a year marked by natural and social upheavals, has generally benefited China’s leaders.

Foreign media have often focused on Beijing’s negatives, from bristling security to smoggy air to rampant, “Chinglish” signage to, most importantly, the lack of improvements in areas such as human rights and freedom of speech. But we should not underestimate the capacity for stunning spectacle and effervescent hospitality in the Northern Capital in the coming weeks to play well to domestic audiences, who are less focused on human rights and dissent than are international viewers, and will hear much less about any protests or government missteps should these occur (though the increasingly assertive Chinese blogosphere won’t let these things pass without some caustic comment, especially if official corruption, still the hot-button issue in China, seems to be involved).

The grandeur of the arenas and the ceremonies–and China’s medal count–are what domestic journalists and broadcasts and their target audiences focus on. And, if all goes smoothly in Beijing, that may still be what international audiences remember most about the 2008 games. This won’t necessarily be a good thing for human rights in China: the court is still out as to the long-term impact the games will have on that front, as a case can still be made that despite the crackdowns and high security, there have been some important positive developments under the radar relating to increased room for maneuver by civil society actors due to the media glare. But if the games are seen globally as well as locally as having been a success, this might open doors for a growing international acquaintance with the local characters of at least a few of the Chinese largest cities, as they get the chance to host international spectacles of their own.

Two thousand and eight was to have been an auspicious year for China. But the year has been anything but.

In January, a wave of polite demonstrations over planned urban development washed over Shanghai. Then freak snowstorms left 200,000 citizens stranded and angry over the government’s failure to deal with the emergency. Next, demonstrations and riots broke out in Lhasa, Tibet’s main city, and beyond. The flame of the Olympic torch relay was nearly doused by international protests and threats of a boycott. And now the catastrophic Sichuan earthquake has claimed as many as 80,000 lives, rendering millions homeless and raising fears of significant damage to the country’s infrastructure.

And it’s only May. No matter what happens next, 2008 is shaping up to be one of the most eventful and tragic years in recent Chinese history. And the way the Chinese people and the Communist Party leadership have risen to meet these unforeseen events challenges us in the West to rethink our often distorted view of China. Here are five lessons that are emerging:

1. China’s economics, politics and social structures are undergoing profound and rapid change.

This is obvious, but many outside critics of China continue to insist that when it comes to politics, the continuation of Communist Party is still the country’s defining characteristic.

Unquestionably, there are continuities going back to the era defined by Chairman Mao: the Party retains its monopoly on power, periodically uses draconian measures against those it deems threatening and seeks to control the media. But Mao’s cult of personality no longer prevails; the regime now presents itself as worthy of support primarily because of what it can accomplish, as opposed to the purity of its ideology; and China’s leaders are showing far more flexibility toward certain kinds of dissent.

The government’s restrained response to the “strolls” by middle-class residents of Shanghai concerned about the impact the expansion of a high-speed train would have been much more surprising thirty years ago than it was three months ago. The same goes for Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s decision to publicly acknowledge that the government should have done more to protect travelers stranded by late January and February’s harsh winter storms.

And even the most skeptical observer needs to acknowledge the night-and-day contrasts between the current earthquake response and the cover-up that followed the Tangshan earthquake of July 1976, which hit just a few months before Mao’s death. When that earlier disaster struck, Beijing rebuffed offers of foreign aid, claimed that Mao’s ideology was all the country needed to deal with the catastrophe, and tightly controlled access to the affected area.

2. It is misleading to compare today’s China to Nazi Germany at the time of the 1936 Berlin Games or the Soviet Union at the time of the 1980 Moscow Games.

These two historical analogies, often invoked by human rights activists who call for a boycott of the Beijing Games, generate a great deal of heat but precious little light. Here are just a few places where each analogy falls apart:

Communist Party leaders in China today, like their Soviet counterparts in 1980, can be said to head a propaganda state. But Chinese journalists have shown much more independence in their coverage of many news events, including the current crisis in Sichuan, than Soviet journalists did a quarter-century ago. And Beijing now is trying much harder to court public opinion than Moscow did then (see Lesson One).

Ethnic prejudice continues to play a disturbing role in China’s policies toward Tibetans. But this prejudice has more in common with how Western empires of the past viewed and treated colonial subjects than how Hitler viewed and treated Jews. And China no longer has an adulated leader in the style of Mao, who claims his ideology is a sacred creed worth dying for (see Lesson One again).

China certainly has some important things in common with a variety of partially closed societies in which one ruling party holds a monopoly on power. But it is misleading to liken it to Burma and North Korea. These may be neighboring countries with which China has historic ties and close relations. But both come much closer than does China to qualifying as totalitarian rather than simply authoritarian states.

One sign of how inept the Burma analogy is how China’s leaders responded to the earthquake. They allowed internationalist journalists into the affected areas and welcomed foreign aid. By contrast, when responding to the cyclones that hit their country, Burma’s military strongmen kept all foreign reporters out and treated offers of humanitarian aid with intense suspicion.

Like Burma but unlike China, North Korea has tried to suppress information about disasters, including large-scale famines. It is also a country where veneration of a supposedly perfect leader, Kim Jong-il, is a central feature of the political order. Looking at developments in North Korea may justly bring to mind analogies with China in the days of the horrific Great Leap Forward famine of the late 1950s and early 1960s and the Tangshan earthquake, both of which occurred when Mao’s personality cult resembled Kim Jong-il’s. But hardly the PRC today. (Again, see Lesson One.)

4. International opinion matters to China’s leaders, but what what the Chinese people think matters more.

It is true that Chinese municipal and national leaders do not need to compete in open elections. But the opinion of their own people–especially the urban middle class and Internet-savvy youths–matters a great deal. When China’s leaders perceive resentment among these groups, they tend to modify policy, as they did by tabling plans for the high-speed train line in Shanghai after the January protests. Or they make public relations gestures. Or do a combination of these two things. At such times, they act something like officials who expect to stand for re-election.

The special importance of domestic opinion was illustrated by the international uproar over the Olympic torch relay. Complaints about this ritual from the European Union and the United States only seemed to harden the government’s determination to carry on. But in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, something different happened. When some Chinese Netizens complained about the celebratory tone of state media coverage of the torch relays, the government quickly shifted gears, calling on state media to adopt a more somber tone and introduce a moment of silence to honor earthquake victims into displays of the torch at each new stop on the route. The relay became an event in which pleas for donations to support earthquake victims figured prominently. And after calls by Chinese bloggers and independent-minded journalists for the government to make even more dramatic changes to the torch plans, a three-day moratorium on the relay has been called to show respect for the suffering in Sichuan.

5. The government may manipulate public opinion, but cannot entirely control it.

There is no question that nationalistic textbooks and other state publications and pronouncements have influenced how some Chinese think about their country’s place in the world. This can spawn jingoistic flare-ups when the public feels the outside world is being unfair to China. It is also true that public opinion regarding Tibet, a region of which many residents of the PRC have only second-hand knowledge, is shaped to a large extent by official propaganda. And many Han Chinese felt a hard line was justified after widespread media coverage of Tibetan protesters in Lhasa engaging in violence.

But love of country continues to be a double-edged sword in China. During each recent nationalistic upsurge–from the 1999 anti-American agitation that followed NATO bombs hitting the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade to the recent anti-French demonstrations triggered by pro-Tibet protesters in Paris who roughed up a disabled torch carrier–the government has not so much stage-managed the outburst as scrambled to jump ahead of public sentiment and channel anger. The Party feared, in each case, that complaints about foreigners would merge with complaints about domestic issues–as occurred at many points in the twentieth century, sometimes leading to the downfall of officials or entire regimes.

There has been considerable public criticism in China of celebratory images of the torch relay as the country reels from the Sichuan earthquake. This illustrates yet again that love of country can take many forms. It also shows that Chinese audiences can be very critical consumers of state media. It is worth noting that Chinese journalists working in the competitive field of newspapers and magazines know that the earthquake story is significant for their readers. Reporters rushed to Sichuan even when the government was encouraging them to rely on images and text provided by official agencies. And some newspapers and websites continue to mix coverage that hews to official lines and that diverges from it–for example, highlighting the degree to which shoddy building practices, due to corrupt ties between construction companies and local officials, have contributed to the collapse of so many schools.

In China’s Brave New World (2007), my most recent book, I devote one chapter to taking a playful look at how baffled Mao would be by contemporary China. He’s surprised to see a Shanghai with far more skyscrapers than Manhattan, by a Beijing with scores of McDonald’s and by bookstore shelves containing translations of works by Western liberal philosophers and by reports of capitalists being welcomed into the Communist Party. The book came out less than a year ago, but I’m already wishing I could revise that chapter. There are so many things to add–such as the regime’s decision to let National Public Radio reporters file reports from earthquake-ravaged parts of Sichuan.

Given how fast China has been changing and continues to change, we too have a right to be baffled. Perhaps the biggest challenge of this very inauspicious year is for us in the West to find new ways to think about the world’s most populous country. A good first step would be to discard the cold-war lenses that have distorted our vision, and look with fresh eyes at a protean nation still in the process of being born.

To boycott or not to boycott, that is the question. Rather, that’s just one of the questions activists are facing right now when it comes to China. At least four different Olympics boycott-related debates are currently taking place in print, online and broadcast media.

Since 2001, when the news first broke that Beijing would host the 2008 Olympic Games, activists have questioned whether it would be helpful or counterproductive for those concerned about China’s human rights record or Beijing’s ties to brutal foreign powers to pull out of this year’s games.

Then there’s the debate-within-this-debate that centers on the partial boycott plan. This plan, associated with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, among others, would have world leaders go to Beijing in August, but skip the opening ceremony as an act of protest.

The third debate revolves around the Olympic torch relay and focuses on individuals skipping their turns to carry the flame to protest the crackdown in Tibet, as two South Koreans scheduled to participate did when the flame passed through Seoul.

Last but not least, there is a lively debate within China centering on Chinese citizen boycotts of certain Western companies’ products. Here, the primary focus is Carrefour, the French supermarket chain that is second only to Wal-Mart in global sales.

Carrefour is being attacked for three reasons: the rough treatment a Chinese torch carrier received in Paris, critical comments Sarkozy has made about the games and rumors that Carrefour executives or investors have been offering financial support to the Dalai Lama, whom some Chinese insist was the mastermind behind the Lhasa riots that cost some Han Chinese and Hui Muslim their lives.

CNN, which has been singled out as having been particularly unfair to China in its coverage of the recent unrest in Tibet, is also being targeted for boycotts. The fact that CNN anchor Jack Cafferty recently said China was full of “goons and thugs” probably didn’t help either.

But how exactly does one boycott CNN? The network doesn’t sell a specific product and isn’t available to most Chinese citizens. It is usually blocked except in high-end hotels.

However in Carrefour’s case, crowds have already gathered outside some of the more than 100 stores the chain owns in China to discourage customers from entering. Calls have gone out on the Internet for all Chinese to refuse to shop at Carrefour either on a single day (May 1) or during the first four days of May.

There are connections between all of the boycott debates currently in play. But it is a mistake to treat the boycott of Carrefour and the criticism of CNN as simply a tit-for-tat phenomenon, a case of angry Chinese taking a purely reactive “if you take aim at our games, we’ll take aim at your profits” attitude. China has a long tradition of using anti-foreign boycotts to counter everything from invasions to perceived insults to the nation’s honor.

Chinese youths fired up by what they consider patriotism (but critics brand nationalism or xenophobia) have historically launched boycotts of foreign goods, sometimes on their own, sometimes in tandem with their elders. In 1905, it was cigarettes and other American products that Chinese citizens of all different ages boycotted in order to put pressure on the United States to change immigration policies that discriminated against Asians.

Between the 1910s and 1930s, several foreign powers found themselves the target of Chinese student-led boycotts. In the majority of cases, Japanese products were the ones that were shunned, in protest of Japan’s encroachments into North China. One of the biggest of these took place during the May Fourth Movement of 1919, one of the many Chinese patriotic struggles that have taken place around this time of year.

In more recent years, boycotts have remained a regular part of Chinese society. In May 1999, when I happened to be in Beijing, I saw “Don’t Buy KFC” and “Don’t Drink Coke” posters go up on local campuses soon after American bombs hit the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. In spring 2005, a series of rowdy demonstrations against Japan broke out.

These protests were triggered by talk of Tokyo getting a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and complaints about how certain Japanese textbooks treated the history of World War II. Yet again there was a call for a boycott.

So while the dueling boycotts of 2008 are linked, calls to pull out of the games and calls to refuse to shop at Carrefour have very different historical echoes and fit into different historical traditions. They also summon up some very different historical moments.

Nineteen thirty-six and 1980 have been common touchstone years in Western debates on Olympic boycotts. Those calling for action against Beijing say it is time to do what the world should have done when the Nazis played host to the games in 1936–refuse to grant legitimacy to a brutal regime. Those opposing a full or partial boycott of the Olympics like to counter by pointing out how little good it did when the US pulled out of the 1980 Moscow games.

Another year brought into play, in this case by Chinese who oppose the boycott of Carrefour, is 1900, the time of the Boxer Rebellion. Some have cited this historical moment as an illustration of how, when nationalist fervor gets out of hand and turns “irrational,” China ends up being harmed rather than helped–in that case via the invasion by a group of foreign powers that crushed the insurrection. To boycott foreign goods at this particular moment, the argument goes, is “irrational,” given how important investment from abroad is to China’s economic surge.

There is an irony here. Boycotts were defended in China early in the 1900s as a far more “rational” way to register anger at foreign powers than committing acts of violence again Christians, as the Boxers had done. But it is true that early in the twentieth century, rallies organized to attack foreign goods sometimes spilled over into physical assaults on foreign individuals or Chinese seen as insufficiently patriotic. The same thing sometimes happens these days.

Why is it important for Westerners to appreciate how the anti-French boycott fits into China’s past? Because to overlook historical precedents and resonances, and think of the debate over shopping at Carrefour as simply a “derivative discourse” (to borrow a phrase from post-colonial theorist Partha Chatterjee), makes it impossible to understand fully what is going on in Chinese cities and in the minds of Beijing’s leaders.

When rowdy demonstrations have taken place outside of Carrefour stores, China’s leaders have found themselves confronted by what is in many ways a familiar dilemma. They are torn between a desire to use popular nationalist sentiment for their own purposes (as a diversion from other kinds of discontent, such as worries about inflation) and a fear of losing control once crowds take to the streets.

China’s leaders, who have gone on record as opposing the Carrefour boycott, know that while they can fan or dampen the flames of popular nationalism, it has never been something they can totally control. Such protests are fueled by genuine outrage, as well as by a generational desire on the part of youths bent on proving their patriotism to express themselves in public. China’s leaders also know that in the past targets of protests have shifted quickly from foreigners accused of humiliating the Chinese people to domestic officials accused of being corrupt or otherwise unfit to run the country. Still, many average Chinese citizens want the Olympics to go smoothly and stand as a symbol of China’s return to global prominence.

Yet as we approach two symbolically charged dates–International Labor Day on May 1 and the anniversary of the 1919 cultural awakening of the May Fourth Movement three days later–calls for a boycott are sure to make any Chinese leader with a sense of history jittery.

Karl Marx famously observed that history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. But when it comes to the periodic clashes between Tibetan protesters and China’s authorities, tragedy is all one can see.

As in 1959 and 1989 a familiar story is now unfolding in Lhasa. Once again, crowds of Tibetans angered by limits on their autonomy and fearful of the destruction of their culture took to the streets. Once again, after a wave of protests, a harsh crackdown has begun. Each time, the drama has started in March–no mystery, really, since the 1989 and 2008 protests were triggered in part by the arrival of the anniversary of the 1959 unrest, which swelled into a full-fledged uprising.

History never really repeats itself exactly in any setting. This time, there is the added drama of the Olympics, which take place in Beijing in August, preceded by the spectacle of the Olympic torch making its way across Asia. In early May relay runners are expected to carry the flame through the Himalayas, all the way to Mount Everest.

The Games have focused international attention on nearly every aspect of the People’s Republic of China, including the regime’s flawed human rights record. There has also been hope among activists that the Chinese leadership will this time feel more constrained in its use of force against protesters. It is an open question as to how different the strategy used against the Tibetan demonstrations and riots would have been if the Games weren’t on the horizon.

It is indisputable, though, that the Olympics have influenced the official Chinese response to events in Tibet. One tangible Games-related result is that Beijing has pressured Nepal’s government to close off access to Everest from that country’s side of the mountain. This should ensure that no pesky “Free Tibet” banners are unfurled when the torch is at its highest point this spring, since plans to beef up security on Everest’s Chinese side have been in place for some time.

But it remains doubtful that the regime will be able to keep tourists or spectators in Beijing from voicing support for the Dalai Lama or making eye-catching pro-Tibet gestures while the Games are actually taking place in August.

Communication is another issue. Beijing has made more use than ever before of video footage that shows Tibetans engaging in acts of violence. The regime’s “Net Nanny,” as the cyber-censorship system is sometimes called, has been working overtime, trying to sweep the Web free of all postings that present the protesters in a positive light. And the blogosphere has been filled with comments on Tibet that spin off in many directions, with many nationalistic young Chinese expressing harsh criticism of the Lhasa protesters, while human rights groups stress the injustice of the crackdown in stepped up calls for a boycott.

It may be some time until we know just what happened last week in Lhasa, who did what to whom and when. The city has been sealed off from most foreign observers, yet there have been excellent reports by The Economist‘s James Miles and some scattered messages from international tourists as well as on-the-spot commentaries from outsiders. It remains to be seen how high the toll of violence was when frustrated Tibetan youths lashed out against locals of other ethnicities (both Han Chinese and members of the Hui Muslim minority). Nor do we know how many protesters were beaten, killed or arrested when paramilitary forces moved in to quell the unrest.

Still, it seems likely that as more specifics come to light, what will emerge is a pattern that, despite its distinctively 21st-century features, is easily recognizable to those who have followed the tense push and pull between Tibet and Beijing. The outlines of a tragic and painful dynamic that we have seen before are daily becoming more distinct.

Yet Marx’s suggestion that tragedy and farce are closely linked is not completely without relevance in a situation that pits Tibetan desires for independence (or at least cultural autonomy) against Beijing’s determination to maintain control (and prevent what it dubs an illegitimate separatist movement).

Tragedy gave way to farce in August 2007, when without any apparent irony, the Chinese authorities issued an injunction against unauthorized reincarnation. Concerned by various statements the Dalai Llama had made about how his succession might work, the officially atheist Beijing government laid down the law. To become a “living Buddha without governmental approval,” the edict read, “is illegal and invalid.

And just before the most recent round of protests began, Icelandic songstress Bjork performed in China’s biggest city. The dramatic high point of her show came when she sang “Declare Independence,” a song that includes exhortations like “Protect your language” and “Make your own Flag!” Though it was written with the Faroe Islands and Greenland in mind, and though the singer has sometimes dedicated renditions of it to Kosovo’s people, she gave it a new twist in Shanghai, saying “Tibet, Tibet” after finishing the number–a local gesture that gained global attention on YouTube.

The Chinese government’s response to this was annoyance, leading to a call for closer advance scrutiny of the playlists of foreign performers. One of the first to suffer was Harry Connick, Jr., who put on a show in Beijing just as the protests in Tibet began. According to Beijing-based blogger Jeremiah Jenne, who attended the concert, the audience went away disgruntled by the brevity of the show, the lack of encores, and the fact that the singer barely used his horn section. Afterward, Jenne notes, scattered wire reports and Web posts explained why Connick and his band couldn’t find their groove. Officials showed up right before the show and, working from one of the singer’s old playlists, demanded that he substitute some “safer” numbers for those he had planned to perform.

Even the most paranoid Beijing official has not suggested that there is a direct connection between what Bjork did in Shanghai and what the people of Lhasa did soon afterwards. Nor would I suggest, as new details emerge about the human rights abuses in Tibet, that official meddling with the song list of a foreign performer is a major issue.

Still, the tragic and farcical developments of recent weeks underscore the inherent conflict between China’s desire to place itself in the global spotlight and its hope that no one will focus on the nation’s flaws. They want internationally acclaimed artists to perform in cities like Shanghai without doing unexpected things–even if, like Bjork, part of their cachet is an ability to surprise an audience. But the Chinese leadership is no more capable of balancing these tensions than Don Quixote was of slaying windmills.

The theme song for the Olympics is “We Are Ready,” which points to the fact that Beijing now has world-class arenas in which to hold sporting events. But when it comes to having an Olympic year that follows a script it can control, the song that sums the situation up more effectively might be “The Impossible Dream.”

Shanghai is famous for many things, from its eye-catching architecture to its historic role linking China to the world. But within the People’s Republic of China, the city also is revered for its central role in twentieth-century protests.

In the early 1900s, Shanghai workers staged some of China’s first strikes. The Cultural Revolution began in Beijing in 1966 with the Red Guards but peaked in the Shanghai uprising of 1967, when revolutionary groups, modeling themselves after the Paris Commune, took over the city government and the Communist Party Committee. And though the great upheaval of 1989’s Beijing Spring is rightly associated with Tiananmen Square, the student-led protests that paved the way for that epochal struggle took place two and a half years earlier, in Shanghai’s counterpart to that plaza, People’s Square.

This is worth remembering in light of what’s been happening lately in China’s largest city. For the last two weekends, protesters opposed to plans to extend the city’s fastest-on-earth magnetic levitation train–the maglev–took to the streets in marches that organizers dubbed “collective walks,” to avoid seeming too controversial when confronting a regime that often deals harshly with acts of dissent.

The maglev, which can rocket passengers at record-breaking speeds well over 200 miles per hour, currently connects the Pudong airport at the eastern edge of the metropolis to a nearby subway station. The authorities want it to do much more. The first extension in the works would link Pudong’s new airport to the old Hongqiao airport west of the city.

This has angered residents of some largely middle-class neighborhoods through which the new rail line would run. They claim that proximity to the path of noisy maglev trains would make their property values plummet, disturb the tranquillity of their homes and perhaps even pose health hazards to their children.

This is not the first time a novel mode of transportation has triggered a Shanghai protest. A century ago, rickshaw pullers smashed trams that threatened their livelihood. But as a longtime student of Shanghai protests, I can say with conviction that the anti-maglev protests aren’t quite like anything seen in the early 1900s or even Tiananmen times. Describing mass actions as “collective walks” is new, as is coordinating actions via text messages and having videos of marches uploaded onto YouTube.

This decidedly twenty-first-century form of protest in Shanghai resonates with recent demonstrations in other Chinese cities–notably the 2007 protests in Xiamen, again mostly led by members of a burgeoning new middle class, which successfully blocked the opening of a chemical plant. Both protests involve specific goals being pursued by people who do not challenge the government’s legitimacy but simply call on it to do a better job of listening to those in whose name it claims to rule–and make good on its own stated goals, such as working to improve the material well-being and quality of life of the Chinese population.

It would be a mistake to ignore parallels between the current Shanghai protests and earlier events in the city’s history that began with daily-life concerns and calls simply for greater government responsiveness, yet ultimately swelled into broader movements that challenged the legitimacy of an authoritarian ruling party. Protests of this sort took place in the 1940s against the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-Shek, triggered by hyperinflation. When students of the Tiananmen generation first took to the streets in Shanghai in the mid-1980s, their grievances were largely about the living conditions on campuses but mushroomed into a much more radical set of demands that caught the world’s attention in the Beijing Spring of 1989.

One enduring tendency in events of this sort, which is again seen in the anti-maglev agitation, is for protesters to play upon official slogans. The Communist Party has made a fetish of late of valuing “harmony” and “stability” and introducing reforms that improve the quality of life of ordinary people, in part by allowing them to own their own property. The anti-maglev protesters play upon these stated goals, insisting that the new rail line will undermine the “harmony” and “stability” of their neighborhoods and make their living conditions worse.

Protesters insist that what matters most to them is something very basic, which the regime has also promised to deliver–a government that will listen to the concerns of citizens and make a meaningful response.

The slogans of the Nationalists in the 1940s and the Communists in the 1980s were not identical, but the tendency of protesters to call on these regimes to live up to their stated ideals was the same. So, too, was the cry for officials to demonstrate a greater readiness to listen.

There are parallels here even with the Tiananmen protests, which Westerners often misremember as involving the same kind of demand for regime change that was heard that year in places like Poland. By contrast, in China even then the core demand of protesters was simply that the Communist Party make good on its promises–especially its promise to fight corruption–and engage in a true dialogue. Chinese students were willing to have Communist Party rule continue, but insisted that the country needed that organization to be run by people who would be more transparent, avoid nepotism (the most galling incidents of corruption often involve the family members of high-ranking officials), allow a greater degree of individual freedom and show concern for the people’s welfare.

If the current protests call to mind a single historical moment, it is not 1989 but 1986. And this is not just because protesters are again gathering in the same part of People’s Square where I saw students congregate a generation ago.

Then, as now, protesters were largely members of a highly articulate group with reason to feel good about the overall direction in which the country was heading. But this didn’t stop them from desiring a government less arbitrary and more willing to listen to their concerns.

The students of 1986 talked more about abstract ideals–including democracy–than the anti-maglev protesters have. But they also had specific grievances linked to daily life. Some complained about mandatory morning calisthenics. Others were angered that security guards had roughed up youths for dancing in the aisles at a recent concert by Jan and Dean, one of the first foreign pop groups to perform in China.

Chinese authorities today should keep in mind how things that happened in 1987 and 1988 worked to radicalize and alienate China’s university students. Shanghai’s students left the streets readily in 1986, once officials signaled that their patience was wearing thin and expressed concern that the demonstrations could end up harming the very reform process that the protesters wanted to speed up.

The youths felt pretty good, initially, about how things had gone. They had not accomplished anything specific but had been allowed to express their opinions without major reprisals.

But the situation soon deteriorated. The regime launched a campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” viewed by the students as a step backward in terms of personal freedom. And Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang was demoted for having treated the protests too lightly–something that transformed him into a hero in the students’ eyes.

Even by 1989, many students viewed the Party as something that needed to be transformed, not toppled. But their regard for it had been damaged. This made it easy for protests to escalate quickly, once the unexpected death of Hu Yaobang brought them back out onto the streets.

Things are different now. Middle-class protesters in Xiamen and Shanghai have been more insistently focused on local issues with a NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) dimension, such as the damaging effects that development can have to air quality and the danger of noise pollution, than were the students of two decades ago.

Still, China’s rulers should remember how easily authoritarian regimes can lose the good will of even those who like some things that the government is doing. This happened when Deng Xiaoping and company alienated a generation of students in the 1980s, and four decades before, when the Nationalist Party lost the respect of many members of that era’s urban middle class with brutal crackdowns, failing to curb official corruption and caring for little other than maintaining their control of the reins of government.

The history of Shanghai protest is filled with reminders of how dangerous it can be for a regime to appear unwilling to listen. While there may be risks to an authoritarian regime in allowing protests to continue unchecked, it may end up more damaged by leaping too quickly to treating any form of criticism as an unacceptable affront to authority.

In the lead-up to the Olympics, commentators in the West and in China have tended to focus on big issues. Some foreign critics have called for a boycott of the Games because of Beijing’s links to horrific actions taking place in Darfur and Burma. And Chinese Communist Party spokesmen assert that the Olympics will be a proud moment for all citizens of the PRC, since they will demonstrate that China is a major player on the global stage.

Thinking in international terms is certainly appropriate right now, given China’s large global footprint. Still, it is important not to lose sight of the importance of local issues. While some outsiders anticipate that 2008 will be a year when protests with an international dimension break out in China, it may be that the biggest challenge the government faces this year will turn out to be the one posed by a rapidly growing, highly articulate new social group with decidedly local concerns.

The People’s Republic of China is an unusual place; as someone who teaches about China and regularly travels there, I wouldn’t want it any other way. It would be boring to lecture about a country lacking distinctive elements, and spending time in China would be far less interesting if I weren’t continually struck by ways that it differs from other countries, including this one. It is also true that China is sometimes treated unusually by the international community. Given the size of its population, for example, it is often courted and feared in ways that smaller countries are not.

But I’m distressed by the tendency of so many Americans to assume that everything that goes on in China and everything about the treatment it gets is exotic and unusual. Often things that happen in or involve China are normal–even routine–and we can understand them without factoring in esoteric cultural traits or thinking of the country as a place that, in the global arena, always mysteriously gets handled with kid gloves.

Take the Olympics. To read some American commentaries, you’d think that the Games have virtually never been hosted by human rights-abusing authoritarian regimes–with Berlin in 1936 and Moscow in 1980 the only previous anomalies. According to this line of thinking, the decision for China to host the Games, despite the fact that the country is led by the regime responsible for the June 4, 1989, massacre, proves that it consistently gets coddled.

But the list of authoritarian states that have hosted the Olympics is actually fairly long. Militaristic Japan got the go-ahead for the 1940 Games (though these were ultimately canceled). In 1968 the Olympic Games were held days after a massacre of students in Mexico (then a one-party state). In 1988, when Seoul got the nod to host the Games, South Korea was run by the same autocrats with blood on their hands from the Kwangju Massacre in 1980.

And consider the current furor over product safety and piracy. Here the situation is fairly typical for a country at a certain stage of capitalist development, yet China somehow is regarded differently.

Troubling forms of corruption are endemic to China, making it easy for well-connected people to get away with flouting copyright and product safety laws. Still, as American historian Stephen Mihm notes in a recent essay published in the Boston Globe, chalking up the piracy and product problems to China’s unique features is “a tempting way to see things, but wrong.”

That’s because what’s “happening halfway around the world may be disturbing, even disgraceful, but it’s hardly foreign,” Mihm writes. “A century and a half ago, another fast-growing nation had a reputation for sacrificing standards to its pursuit of profit, and it was the United States…. American factories turned out adulterated foods and willfully mislabeled products. Indeed, to see China today is to glimpse, in a distant mirror, the 19th-century American economy in all its corner-cutting, fraudulent glory.”

Something else that’s “hardly foreign” but has been treated as exotic is Mattel executive Thomas Debrowski’s apology to China for the country’s factories taking all the heat initially for his company’s recalls. Debrowski’s point was simple: even though Chinese factories shouldn’t use lead paint (a banned substance), fewer toys were recalled for this reason than for containing magnets harmful to toddlers if swallowed. In producing those, Chinese factories just faithfully followed flawed designs that were made in the USA.

In America, people and corporations trying to move beyond an unpleasant moment routinely make public apologies. Don Imus and his employers did this, for example, after the radio host insulted a group of female athletes. And the president of Duke University recently apologized for not doing more to support members of the school’s lacrosse team when they were being investigated as a result of rape charges that were eventually dropped.

And yet, to explain Debrowski’s actions, many commentators felt compelled to invoke esoteric concepts and terms. The company had “kowtowed” to China (a term conjuring up exotic images of feudal obeisance). Debrowksi had apologized in a very public way, a business professor claimed in a widely circulated AP report, because “saving face…is very important in the Chinese culture.”

Funny, when Imus and his employers made their apologies, this wasn’t referred to as “kowtowing” to anyone. Nor have the very public actions taken by Duke’s president been said to reveal an American cultural obsession with face-saving.

Aha, a skeptic might interject–there’s still something culturally distinctive about the way Chinese officials recounted Debrowski’s apology. To protect the regime’s reputation, they claimed that Mattel had assured the world that China and its factories were completely blameless.

That was misleading but hardly exotic. Can Americans really claim without blushing that spin control intended to “save face” and deflect criticism from government failings is unknown here? Doesn’t our President keep presenting reports of minimal progress amidst cascading disaster in Iraq as proof his policies are working?

To borrow Mihm’s phrasing, when the Chinese regime acts in “disturbing” or “disgraceful” ways, we should by all means speak out against this behavior and try to change it. But when we do so, it would be disingenuous to pretend that China’s behavior is exotic. Often, the things we want Beijing to stop doing–recklessly using fossil fuels, mistreating ethnic groups living in frontier regions, and so on–are much like things that America is doing or used to do, much as we wish now that it hadn’t.

The Chinese regime deserves to be chastised for the shameful way it continues to prop up the thuggish rulers of Burma, including moving to block a forceful UN censure, just because they happen to be allies. But what Beijing is doing is not so different from what Washington did in 1980 at the time of the Kwangju Massacre, when the protesters being mowed down were Korean rather than Burmese and the thugs behind the killings were our allies, not China’s.

We should try to work from a novel starting point whenever we want to criticize China–or indeed when we want to praise it or simply try to understand it. Namely, assume that despite its unusual size, distinctive history and other things that set it apart and make it anomalous (such as being run by a Communist Party that has embraced elements of capitalism), China has many features that are familiar, not exotic.

It’s been nearly thirty years since Washington and Beijing normalized diplomatic relations. Isn’t it time we finally normalized the way we think and talk about China?

Like other China specialists, I’ve been asked crystal-ball questions like this many times–even though the start of the Games on 8-8-08 (a date that many Chinese view as chock-full of lucky numbers) is still nearly a year away.

I’ve tried to dodge such questions, having good reason to worry about making predictions where China and the Olympics are concerned. After all, both the country and the event have often surprised us in the past.

Fifteen years ago, for example, many thought China’s Communist Party was on its last legs–and few imagined it would soon welcome capitalists into its ranks. Then, as an example of a failed Olympics prediction, consider the Los Angeles Times story that claimed Chinese excitement over sports had reached “such a pitch” that within a short time–“perhaps only a few Olympiads”–Beijing would be “the scene of the world’s Olympics.” Not a bad prediction, if it had been made in 1984 or even 1964. But the story ran July 20, 1914.

Still, the invitations to prognosticate aren’t likely to stop, so I’ve come up with an answer–or at least pretend to do so.

When people ask if the Olympics will change China, I say the tense is misleading. The Games already have changed it. To prepare for 2008, Beijing’s urban landscape has been transformed, as old neighborhoods have been destroyed, giant new sports arenas built and big countdown clocks set up to tick off the moments until the opening ceremonies start on August 8, 2008–at eight seconds after 8:08 pm, no less.

The Games have affected another Chinese city: Shanghai. When news broke that its rival, Beijing, had gotten the nod from the International Olympic Committee, Shanghai stepped up efforts to secure alternative markers of global prestige and got the go-ahead to host the 2010 World Expo. (In case the parallel with the Games wasn’t clear, local authorities took to calling the upcoming World’s Fair an “Economic Olympics”–and, yes, Shanghai got its own countdown clocks.

When I’m asked what I expect to see in 2008, I say that one thing I’m certain we’ll all see is lots of American media reports that use the Olympics to suggest either that China is changing rapidly and is on the verge of Americanization, or that China is a country that remains stuck in dangerous old ruts and could easily become a threat to all we hold dear. These predictions seem safe, since what I like to call “America’s China Dream” and “America’s China Nightmare”–two story lines that tend to distort, more than they shed light on, Chinese realities–have been circulating for decades. And they’ve already been easily adapted to sports coverage. Witness competing reports on basketball great Yao Ming, who is alternately celebrated for moving easily between East and West and presented as a Frankenstein’s monster-like creation of a Communist sports machine.

The scenarios of dream and nightmare have both gotten boosts from historical analogies. Some see Beijing 2008 as Seoul 1988, an event that could help liberate an authoritarian land. Others see it as Berlin 1936 with Chinese characteristics. My crystal ball tells me just one thing: Whatever happens, we will be surprised. The regime will strive to control matters, but the unexpected will occur.

I say this not just because of China’s prediction-defying track record, but also because many Olympics are remembered for things that weren’t supposed to happen. Yes, Hitler got more legitimacy than he deserved from the 1936 Games, but the stunning performance by a black American athlete, Jesse Owens, was not part of his Aryan-supremacy plan. And who expected Munich 1972 to be remembered for a massacre? The Mexico City Games of 1968 are remembered for the Black Power salute of two African-American runners, who were determined to draw attention to racism in the country for which they had just won medals.

It would be foolish to speculate about what sort of unplanned yet highly memorable event might happen during the Beijing Games. But you don’t need a crystal ball to know the sort that China’s leaders worry about most: a symbolic act of protest by a Chinese athlete or even a scene-stealing gesture of defiance by a spectator while the world’s gaze is fixed on Beijing. This is no idle fear, as there is a long list of issues–rampant official corruption, exploited workers, limits on freedom of speech and religion, etc.–to which a protester might want to direct attention.

The Olympics always provide a unique platform for the world’s finest athletes. The 2008 Games will also provide one for Hu Jintao and company in their ongoing quest to convince domestic audiences that they have made China great again; they seek to persuade international audiences that they are steering their country and its booming economy down the right path. But this platform can’t be controlled–and China’s leaders are shrewd enough to realize the risk of trying too hard to keep the unexpected from happening. Their hope of having the 2008 Games remembered as China’s great global coming-out party could crumble, not just as a consequence of protests but of ham-handed security measures that end in making the 2008 Games memorable less for their grandeur than for the tightly monitored nature of the proceedings.

The most interesting Olympic event to watch could turn out to be one not recognized by the International Olympic Committee: The tightrope-walk China’s leaders attempt when the global media are more focused on Beijing than they have been since 1989–a fateful year when, as we know and Hu Jintao knows too, international audiences were alternately inspired by images of youthful Chinese protesters and appalled those of menacing Chinese tanks.

Books on China by American journalists (including Nation contributors such as Edgar Snow, Agnes Smedley and Orville Schell) have at times played a crucial role in shaping American perceptions of the world’s most populous country. The heyday of what might be called “Whither China Reportage,” in the mid-twentieth century, saw the appearance of classic works such as Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (1936), Agnes Smedley’s Battle Hymn of China (1943) and Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby’s Thunder Out of China (1946). What had been a steady stream slowed to a trickle under Mao (1949-76), but the flow resumed early in the Reform period (beginning in 1978) with the publication of widely read forays into Whither China Reportage such as Fox Butterfield’s China: Alive in the Bitter Sea (1982) and Schell’s To Get Rich Is Glorious (1984). And in the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen protests and the June 4 Massacre, the genre underwent an even stronger resurgence.

Among the many books on China published since Tiananmen, none has had a bigger impact than Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn’s China Wakes (1994). After Tiananmen, Kristof and Wudunn claimed, the PRC presented the world with “two faces”; their mission was to figure out which was the true one. Should they be “portraying China” as an “evil empire” run by a “disintegrating dynasty” or as a country that, by opening itself to capitalism, was “raising the living standards of its citizens” with astounding speed? Should they focus on “people like Professor Peng Yuzhang,” an intellectual jailed for his role in the 1989 protests, or on “people like Ye Hongcheng,” a villager who had “toiled as her ancestors had done” for decades, then turned entrepreneur and struck it rich to the point that she could employ sixty laborers? Kristof and Wudunn concluded that China had to choose between its “two faces” and become either the next South Korea or America’s next great Communist enemy.

One can only hope that the Manichean portrait in China Wakes will be eclipsed by the far more subtle one presented by Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones. Hessler’s stylishly written book provides the kind of nuanced analysis we need badly now, with the return in updated guise of both disorting old China dreams (driven by visions of the enormous number of Chinese who could buy our goods and embrace our values) and distorting old China nightmares (driven by visions of the threat that these same people, and their autocratic rulers, could pose to all we hold dear). Oracle Bones demonstrates just how outdated the rhetorical questions posed in China Wakes have become.

Hessler, who first came to China in 1996 at the age of 27 to teach English in Fuling, a small city in Sichuan, and who is now The New Yorker‘s Beijing correspondent, belongs to a generation less burdened by the intellectual framework of the cold war. To make sense of today’s China, he argues, we need to understand that it has been following a unique trajectory, and that it is inhabited by more than just the four basic types of people who most interested Kristof and Wudunn: successful entrepreneurs; people the reforms were leaving behind (such as the villagers who ended working for Ye Hongcheng and residents of unusually poor parts of the country); dissidents; and the officials who persecute dissidents.

Hessler writes on a range of topics, from the rise of popular nationalism and the extraordinary velocity of urbanization to factionalism within the Chinese film industry and unrest among the country’s Uighur Muslims, but he does not offer a sustained, systematic answer to the “whither China” question. His approach is more personal and anecdotal, conveying its insights through the stories of people he has met. Some of his interview subjects make repeated appearances, such as a young teacher, referred to throughout by his chosen English name of “William Jefferson Foster,” who shares with Hessler his colorful opinions on topics ranging from dating to international politics. But these men and women (several of whom, like William Jefferson Foster, were students of Hessler’s in Sichuan and have since moved to other parts of China) are not presented as “types,” and their stories make it abundantly clear that China has far more than two faces–and that one can easily be misled by appearances in contemporary China. Indeed, among Hessler’s central concerns is the proliferation in China of objects, activities and organizations that are jiade (fake or phony), a term he uses, appropriately, to refer to everything from counterfeit designer clothes to names for people and groups that do not correspond with what they actually do.

Hessler also reveals that, contrary to much of the commentary on contemporary China, the market reforms since 1978 have not produced discrete categories of “winners” and “losers.” It is striking how many of his subjects have both benefitted from and been disadvantaged by the extraordinary changes that have swept through the PRC. On the one hand, the state has become a less intrusive force in many aspects of their daily lives; on the other, it continues to act at times in an arbitrary, even brutal, fashion. The people Hessler meets are increasingly free in terms of where they choose to live and work, what to buy and so on, but the social security network on which they once relied has been progressively stripped away. One is left with an impression of just how contradictory the reform period has been. And this impression is reinforced by two very different kinds of books that have recently been published: Sang Ye’s China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic, a kaleidoscopic collection of oral histories, and Chaohua Wang’s One China, Many Paths, a compendium of assessments of the recent past and future prospects of the PRC by sixteen Chinese critical intellectuals. Oracle Bones stands a good chance of becoming the defining work of Wither China Reportage that Thunder Out of China was in the 1940s and China Wakes was in the 1990s, not only because Hessler’s depiction of China cuts through the clichés of an earlier era but because he is an unusually gifted writer. He can be poetic, particularly when he is ruminating on the fragmentary evidence we have of the earliest form of Chinese writing, which provides his book with its title and with which he became obsessed–an obsession that led him to chase down aging oracle bones scholars who have ended up on opposite sides of the Taiwan Straits. He can also be humorous, as in an account of a trip he took to a bizarre tourist town on China’s border with North Korea, where one attraction is to peer through a telescope at people living in the mysterious land of Kim Jong Il. What is more, he not only knows how to tell a story; he knows when to step aside and let us hear directly from the mouths of his subjects.

Hessler first achieved prominence with the publication of his 2001 memoir, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, a highly praised account of his experiences as a teacher in China. The memoir-like style of sections of Oracle Bones makes it feel at times like a sequel. In less expert hands, this approach could have raised complaints from readers eager to hear more about China and less about the author’s own adventures in Beijing. Yet Hessler’s narrative gamble pays off. This is partly because he is merely one character among many others, never writing from a position of feigned superiority or omniscience. It is also because he has spent a great deal of time cultivating relationships with his subjects, earning the trust of people who have reason to be wary of American journalists. One of these subjects is Polat, a Uighur Muslim who brokered deals, sometimes very shady ones, between local and Central Asian traders in Beijing. When Polat immigrated to the DC area, Hessler periodically visited him, and among the many things they discussed was the difference between the anti-Muslim prejudice that Polat routinely encountered among Han Chinese in Beijing in the 1990s and the subtler forms he sometimes faced from Americans in this country in the wake of 9/11, on account of his Middle Eastern appearance.

The timing of Oracle Bones could hardly be better. There are certain moments when Americans become unusually interested in China and this is one of them, as even a cursory survey of recent mainstream magazines shows. In December 2004 Business Week ran an extended report on “The China Price,” claiming the phrase had become, for American companies, the scariest in the English language. In 2005 Newsweek, Time and U.S. News and World Report all published special issues on China. In June 2005 Robert Kaplan’s “How We Would Fight China” was the lead story in The Atlantic Monthly, while a photo of Yao Ming, the Chinese NBA star, graced the cover of the September/October 2005 edition of Foreign Policy. Some of this press coverage gives a sense of the PRC as a country undergoing complex changes, but very little of it provides as rich a portrait as Oracle Bones of the ways that individual Chinese are living through, responding to and influencing these transformations.

There are, however, limitations to what even as inventive and daring a foreign journalist as Hessler can do to capture the texture and variety of life in a rapidly changing China. One drawback is that, perhaps inevitably, he ends up having the easiest time reaching (and hence tells his readers the most about) well-educated people. Many teach at the university or grade-school level, as Polat did before political troubles led him to shift course and go into business. Even the one “worker” whose experiences we learn about in detail, a former student of Hessler’s referred to as “Emily” who set off from western Sichuan province to the southeastern boomtown of Shenzhen in the late 1990s, ends up going back to school and getting a job as a teacher before the book ends. In China Candid, by contrast, the cast of characters is much broader in educational background (though most of the people interviewed do live in cities as opposed to the countryside). Another contrast is that here we get Chinese life stories in a less mediated, though by no means completely raw, form. They come to us via interviews conducted by the oral historian and journalist Sang Ye, who was born in the PRC but now lives in Australia. Sang Ye (a nom de plume) has been called China’s answer to Studs Terkel, and the comparison fits in terms of style (both favor techniques, such as editing their own questions out of the text, that make it seem as though the people being interviewed are speaking directly to the reader) and in terms of quality (high praise indeed, as many readers will appreciate). In fact, while reading China Candid, which features an excellent introduction by Geremie Barmé, who led the skilled translation team, I was often reminded of Terkel’s Working.

Like Terkel’s classic, China Candid includes memorable interviews–by turns inspiring, funny and disturbing–with people who form a cross-section of their society. We hear from, among others, a bitter Olympic hopeful who describes doping practices and the pressures athletes face from fans to prove that they are worth all the money the state spent on their training; a union representative nostalgic for the respect that workers received in the 1950s; the mother of an abducted child in the city of Xi’an who recounts bitterly the bureaucratic run-around that she and other parents of kidnapped children encountered from state authorities in their efforts to find their children; a poor but tenacious prostitute living in Shenzhen who hopes to make enough money to return to her mountain village, “find a reliable man,” marry him and “open a small shop or restaurant”; an eerily philosophical executioner, who invokes theories of international law and Confucian thought; a computer hacker who says that the Chinese should not be criticized for pirating Western software, since China came up with so many things that made the digital revolution possible in the first place (“Who discovered magnetism? Pardon me, it was the Chinese!”); and a People’s Liberation Army guide who tells Sang Ye that, for the right price, he lets rich tourists play Rambo (a movie well-known in China) and experience the rush of firing a real torpedo.

Two of Sang Ye’s best interviews reinforce Hessler’s view that the word jiade captures important features of the PRC. One is with a cynical artist who describes the rackets that he and other self-styled bohemians have developed to take advantage of gullible patrons, especially foreigners. “Let me show you something,” he says at the start of the interview. “Just look at this joker’s name card. He’s damned well put ‘homeless artist’ on it. Homeless, my ass. He’s even included an address and phone number!” The other is with a woman employed by a consumer protection agency who goes so far as to suggest that Maoist and current times differ largely in the forms of fakery they practice. “Phony revolutionaries were going around denouncing fake reactionaries” during the Cultural Revolution, she says, but now “imitation goods” are everywhere, and even the people in charge of protecting buyers can easily be bribed to call false things real. “What I’m saying,” she tells Sang Ye, “is that even the Consumer Protection Association is a fake.”

* * *

Where China Candid introduces us to ordinary Chinese from different social strata, the anthology One China, Many Paths features a selection of essays by and interviews with individuals of a single type: high-profile intellectuals, nearly all based within the PRC, and most represented in the volume by works originally published in that country. Not surprisingly, the tone of the writing here is more academic and less variegated, yet the book also reinforces one of Hessler’s main themes: that the PRC is now characterized by a great deal of diversity, in this case diversity of thought. Chaohua Wang, the former Tiananmen leader (now living in Los Angeles) who edited the book, sets out to show two things: Chinese intellectuals are taking widely varying stances on China’s current predicaments, and their viewpoints are worth taking seriously. She succeeds on both fronts, thanks to fine contributions by people such as Wang Anyi (a Shanghai-based novelist who reflects on her good fortune to have been born at a time when China had become a country “where equality between the sexes was always regarded as normal and desirable, even something protected by law” but who came to realize after growing up the various ways that “men and women were not yet truly equal” in the PRC) and Beijing-based social scientist Hu Angang, who bemoans China’s increasing social inequality and the rampant corruption–the “scourge of the time,” in his words.

Some of the contributors argue for the continuing relevance of Marxism in today’s China, insisting that, whatever one’s criticisms of the current regime, Marx’s writings remains an indispensable source of insight, particularly in an era of increasing disparities of income and opportunity. These intellectuals are known in China as “New Leftists.” Other contributors advocate one or another form of liberalism. The question of Marxism’s future in China, a capitalist state run by a Communist Party, remains, not surprisingly, a key site of tension among Chinese intellectuals.

All of the writers in One China, Many Paths advance criticisms of the current leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. Yet, strikingly, only a handful would be considered “dissidents” as the term is typically defined. By staking out positions that call for radical change, yet at the same time presenting themselves as working at least partly within the system, they are carrying on a tradition that long predates 1949 but has stayed alive in the PRC–a tradition of which few Western observers are sufficiently aware. Even in 1989, many intellectual supporters of the Tiananmen uprising characterized their struggle (and not just for reasons of self-preservation) as an effort not to displace the Communist Party but to compel it to live up more fully to its own professed goals. It is telling that journals such as Dushu, edited by Wang Hui, one of the contributors to One China, Many Paths, are neither official organs of the state nor “underground” publications operating without any kind of governmental links. The apparatchik/samizdat opposition applied to the Soviet experience obscures more than it illuminates about intellectual life in contemporary China.

What kinds of conclusions do these books point toward, beyond providing ample evidence that China is far more diverse than the country we often see portrayed in our newspapers and on television? First of all, that it makes little sense to treat the PRC as an “evil empire” or “awakening giant.” While the significance of state repression and the economic boom cannot be doubted, we need to pay attention to such things as the resurgence of intense attachment to localities (the nation, but also much smaller communities), the dramatic increase in forms of mobility (the ability of people to swtich from job to job and city to city) and the divergent lifestyles of people belonging to different groups (defined by generation and ethnicity as well as region, class and religion).

The books are also a reminder that we need to free ourselves from the sense, so palpable when the Berlin wall fell, that China’s Communist Party is living on borrowed time. It will, of course, eventually lose power. No regime lasts forever. But fifteen years have passed since the Soviet Union collapsed, and the PRC is still run by a Communist Party (albeit one that accepts capitalists into its ranks). If the Party’s days have been “numbered” since 1989, the integer is not a small one. Hence one starting point for critical analysis should be asking how exactly the Party has retained control, even during an era when there is considerable popular discontent. Mao once famously said that a “single spark” was enough to “start a prairie fire,” but the PRC of today shows that there can be literally tens of thousands of “sparks” a year (there were 87,000 separate incidents of unrest in 2005 alone, according to the CCP’s own statistics) without igniting a national conflagration.

To be sure, the CCP’s resilience lies partly in its use of force to crush militant protests and to stifle any organization that threatens (or is imagined to threaten) its authority, and its efforts to control the communications media. But force alone cannot explain the party’s hold on power. The Communist Party has skillfully appealed to popular nationalism and, perhaps most important, it has presided over remarkably high growth rates, which have led many Chinese to feel that in material terms their lives have improved. The diversity of experience in the PRC, made possible by the reforms, has paradoxically helped the one-party state to stay afloat. China is now a place where people living in different regions, doing different kinds of jobs and belonging to different generations can easily seem to be living in different worlds. And far from dividing the country into “winners” and “losers,” recent changes have led many people to feel that they are both winning and losing, but in radically dissimilar ways.

Imagine a scholar who is happy that she has an easier time now accessing translations of works in her specialty by Western scholars and traveling abroad to conferences, but who is furious that the state intends to demolish her beloved old house in the heart of Beijing and relocate her to the suburbs. Is she a “winner” or a “loser”? Or imagine a factory worker in his 50s who is angered after being laid off from a state-run company, where he had a job that was supposed to be his for life, yet who is relieved that his children are not criticized periodically, as he once was, because one of their forbears fought in Chiang Kai-shek’s army in the 1930s? Is he a “winner” or a “loser”? Our imagined scholar and imagined worker have both “won” and “lost,” but in such different ways that a protest by one would not automatically generate strong sympathy in the other. And neither would be likely to look favorably on protests by Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang who complain of oppression by Han Chinese colonizers. Americans often assume that rapid development, of the kind that South Korea and Taiwan experienced in the 1980s and that the PRC is experiencing now, will automatically work as a democratizing force, with a newly created middle class demanding an increase in political choices commensurate with their increased economic ones. Ironically, though, while there are certainly middle-class Chinese who would like, and in some cases are agitating for, greater political freedom, the principal outcome of rapid development has been a tendency toward social fragmentation that has undermined the prospects of mass resistance to the state. One reason that protests spread easily in 1989, both in China and elsewhere, was that many people felt that the only meaningful divide in state socialist systems was between a small elite group, who enjoyed a privileged lifestyle, and everyone else. This is not true in the PRC today. And this makes it hard to imagine scenarios that would lead to a repeat of 1989.

Hard–but not impossible. For while the PRC’s boom has lasted longer than the experts predicted, it cannot go on forever. And at some point growing disgust with official corruption could lead people in widely varied social sectors to conclude that the regime’s purported commitment to the nation’s welfare is the most jiade thing about it. Then, to play on the title of a classic work of reportage from another era (the 1940s), when corruption was a “scourge of the time” and an authoritarian regime (that of Chiang Kai-shek) struggled to hold on to power, a new kind of thunder might come out of China.

A hundred days ago Wu'er Kaixi was a fugitive.... Yesterday, before an
audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed
what brought a 21-year-old Beijing Normal School student to the head of
an earth-shaking movement.
He sang a song about a wolf.
And he told people who had listened to two days of often-ponderous
analysis of the student movement that Chinese rock music composers Qin
Qi of Taiwan and Cui Jian of mainland China were more important to the
students than the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi...
The auditorium buzzed with the gasps and whispers of delighted students
and their bewildered elders.
(Boston Globe, September 18, 1989)

John Sebastian's famous lyric about the impossibility of "trying to tell
a stranger about rock and roll" notwithstanding, it was a special moment
indeed when Wu'er Kaixi--the flamboyant Tiananmen student
leader--attempted to do just that. I know. I was one of the strangers
who heard him sing Qin Qi's "Wolf From the North" and explain what its
celebration of individualism meant to his generation. The students
agreed with senior dissidents that institutions must change, he said,
but what they yearned for most was to live in a freer society. (The
anniversary of the Beijing massacre recently passed, on June 4.)

When I witnessed Wu'er's performance, even though I was no longer a
student and even though I had misgivings about any single activist
claiming to speak for the Tiananmen generation, I was definitely in the
"delighted" camp. One reason was that I was in Shanghai in 1986 when
demonstrations occurred that helped lay the groundwork for those of
1989. I was struck then by the Western media's tendency to overstate the
dissident Fang Lizhi's impact. Students found his speeches inspiring,
but other things also triggered protests: complaints about compulsory
calisthenics, for example, and a scuffle at--of all things--a Jan and
Dean concert.

Another reason Wu'er's performance pleased me was that I was to give a
presentation at Harvard the next evening and planned to talk about a
song, albeit one without a backbeat: "Frère Jacques." Why that
one? Because Chinese youth often put new lyrics to it during pre-1949
protests, Red Guards did likewise in the 1960s and the Tiananmen
protesters had just followed suit. Wu'er used a new song to argue for
his generation's uniqueness. But I used an old one to show how often he
and others had reworked (albeit often unconsciously) a rich inherited
tradition.

I also pointed out that the lyrics to the latest version of
"Frère Jacques" (which began "Down With Li Peng, Down With Li
Peng, Deng Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping," and which went on to refer to these
and other Communist Party leaders as "bullies") expressed contempt for
corrupt, autocratic officials.

A desire for reform and personal freedom helped get students onto the
streets--not just in Beijing but in scores of Chinese cities. A major
reason that workers joined them there in such large numbers, though, was
moral outrage, widespread disgust with power-holders whose attachment to
the ideals of the Communist revolution of 1949 had seemingly disappeared
completely. The country's leaders now seemed only to care about
protecting their privileged positions. And this meant, I argued, that
there were topical as well as melodic links between 1989 and some
protests of the first half of the century. During the civil war era
(1945-49), for example, demonstrators criticized the ruling Nationalist
Party's leaders for being corrupt and abandoning the ideals of the
revolution that had brought them to power.

In the many books on the events of 1989 published in Chinese and Western
languages in the past dozen years, the uniqueness of the Tiananmen
generation, the root causes of their activism and the songs that
inspired them have all been handled in still different ways from the two
just described. Most notably, when it comes to music, many Tiananmen
books--including the two under review--have singled out for special
attention one of two songs that neither Wu'er Kaixi nor I discussed.
These are a Communist anthem (the "Internationale") and a composition by
Taiwan pop star Hou Dejian ("Heirs of the Dragon"). Students frequently
sang these songs throughout the demonstrations of mid-April through late
May. And each was sung a final time by the last group of students to
leave Tiananmen Square on June 4, during a pre-dawn exodus that took
them through the nearby streets, which had just been turned into killing
fields by the People's Liberation Army.

Zhao Dingxin's The Power of Tiananmen is the latest in a long
line of works to treat the "Internationale" as the movement's most
revealing song. He claims, in a section on "The Imprint of Communist
Mass Mobilization," that students were drawn to it because it is
"rebellious in spirit" and because a steady diet of post-1949
party-sponsored "revolutionary dramas and films" in which the song
figured had made singing it "a standard way of expressing" discontent
with the status quo. In this section, as elsewhere in his study, Zhao
stresses the importance of history in shaping 1989, but he sees only the
preceding forty years as directly relevant. In contrast to my approach,
which linked the pre-Communist and Communist eras, he distinguishes
sharply between (nationalistic) pre-1949 protests and the
("pro-Western") Tiananmen ones.

The Monkey and the Dragon mentions the "Internationale" and many
other compositions (from Cui Jian's rousing "Nothing to My Name" to the
punk-rock song "Garbage Dump"), but the gently lilting "Heirs" gets most
attention. This is to be expected. Linda Jaivin's book is not a
Tiananmen study per se (though 170 pages of it deal with 1989) but a
biography of Hou Dejian. This fascinating singer-songwriter grew up in
Taiwan and, while still in his 20s, saw "Heirs" become a hit (and be
appropriated for political purposes) on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Soon afterward, he surprised everyone (even close friends like Jaivin)
by defecting to the mainland--only to quickly become a gadfly to the
authorities there.

Hou ended up playing key roles in 1989 both as a songwriter (he penned a
song for the movement, "Get Off the Stage," which called on aging
leaders like Deng to retire) and eventually as a direct participant. He
stayed aloof from the movement at first, but from late May onward threw
himself into it with abandon. In short order, he flew to Hong Kong to
perform in a fundraiser, returned to Beijing to join other intellectuals
in a hunger strike, then helped negotiate a temporary cease-fire that
allowed that last group of youths to leave the square on June 4. In 1990
the party shipped him back across the strait, making him, as Jaivin puts
it, with typical irreverence and stylistic flair, "the first Taiwan
defector to be returned to sender."

Patriotism is the central theme of "Heirs" (the "Dragon" in its title is
China), and Jaivin argues that this explains the song's appeal to a
generation of Chinese students who (like many of their predecessors) saw
themselves as charged with an epic mission to save their homeland from
misrule. According to Jaivin, this patriotism occasionally blurred into
a narrow jingoism of a sort that appalled Hou--particularly because his
song was used to express it. Her discussion of "Heirs" thus plays up
1989's nationalistic side and links it both backward (to pre-1949
struggles by youths determined to save their country) and forward (to
such events as the anti-NATO demonstration that broke out when the
Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit by US warplanes in 1999).

These opening comments on music are meant to convey three things. First,
China's 1989 was a complex, multifaceted struggle (not a simple
"democracy" movement). Second, in part because of this, the events of
that year remain open to competing interpretations, even among those of
us who dismiss (as everyone should) Beijing's self-serving "Big Lie"
about the government's supposed need to use force to pacify
"counterrevolutionary" riots. Third--and this is a much more general
point--providing a clear picture of a multifaceted movement is never
easy.

This is because one has to grapple continually not only with big
questions of interpretation but also numerous small ones of
detail--right down to picking which songs to discuss. This is true
whether the protesters in question are American or Chinese and whether
the person doing the grappling is a former participant (like Wu'er), a
cultural historian (like me), a dispassionate sociologist (like Zhao) or
an impassioned, iconoclastic, frequently entertaining, often insightful
and sometimes self-indulgent
journalist-turned-novelist-turned-biographer (like Jaivin). Whatever the
movement, whoever the writer, contrasting approaches to small matters
can create big gaps in overall perspective.

Leaving China aside, consider how minor divergences can create major
differences in presentations of an American student movement--that of
the 1960s--depending on the answers given to the following questions:
When exactly did this movement begin and end? Which student activists
and which nonstudents (leaders of related struggles, radical
philosophers, singers, politicians) had the largest impact? How much
weight should we give to the protesters' stated goals? How much to
actions that contradicted these? Were countercultural elements central
or peripheral to the movement? Give one set of answers and Abbie Hoffman
gets a chapter to himself, but give another and he becomes a footnote.
The same goes for everyone from Mario Savio to Malcolm X, Herbert
Marcuse to Jane Fonda, Jimi Hendrix to Ronald Reagan. It also goes for
such events as the Free Speech Movement (too early?), be-ins
(irrelevant?) and the first gay-pride parades (too late?).

Accounts of student movements can also diverge, depending on the answers
given to more basic questions. If one has complete data and knows a lot
about "political opportunity structures" and "rational choice analysis,"
can one explain all dimensions of a movement? Or will some things remain
mysterious, such as the moment when a nonviolent event turns violent or
the process by which a song or chant assumes talismanic properties? Do
we need to leave room for spontaneous, even irrational individual
choices? To put this another way, do we need to make analytic space for
what might best be termed--for lack of a more precise word--magic? I
mean by this both the black magic that transforms a group of individuals
into a lynch mob and the glorious sort that leads to brave acts of
inspiring heroism.

It may be true that the potential for divergence between accounts is
unusually great in that particular case, due to the struggle's
protracted nature and connections to other upheavals, especially the
civil rights movement. And yet, anyone who reads Zhao's study and then
Jaivin's book may doubt this. Tiananmen was comparatively short-lived
and self-contained, yet accounts of China's 1989 spin off in
dramatically different directions.

This is not to say that Zhao's and Jaivin's treatments of Tiananmen
never converge. You could even claim that for works by such different
authors--Jaivin's previous writings include a rollicking novel called
Eat Me, while Zhao's peer-reviewed scholarly articles are
peppered with charts and tables--their books have much in common. One
author may rely on things she observed and was told in 1989, the other
on interviews conducted later according to social scientific protocols,
but some of their narrative choices are the same. For instance, each
focuses tightly on Beijing as a site of protest (it was actually just
one of many) and of state violence (there was also a massacre in
Chengdu). And each pays relatively little attention to workers.

Still, it is the divergences between the discussions of 1989 that remain
most striking. There are people Jaivin discusses in detail (Cui Jian)
who are not even listed in Zhao's index. And there are aspects of the
struggle analyzed insightfully by Zhao that are ignored by Jaivin--what
Zhao calls "campus ecology" (the physical structures and social patterns
of student life) for instance. His treatment of the way this shaped 1989
is excellent, yet the topic falls outside the scope of Jaivin's
interests.

The two authors also treat previous studies very differently. Take
sociologist Craig Calhoun's justly acclaimed 1994 study Neither Gods
Nor Emperors. Zhao cites it several times (sometimes approvingly,
sometimes to criticize Calhoun for making too much of 1989's links to
pre-1949 events and patterns); Jaivin never mentions it. On the other
hand, she draws heavily on works by Geremie Barmé, a leading
Australian China specialist whom Zhao never cites. Jaivin's reliance on
Barmé is no surprise: The two co-edited a superb
Tiananmen-related document collection, New Ghosts, Old Dreams,
were married for a time (Monkey includes a diverting account of
their courtship) and remain close friends. What is surprising is that
none of Barmé's writings are listed in Zhao's bibliography. This
wouldn't matter except that some specialists (myself included) think him
among the most consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese
culture and politics.

Switching from references to events, we again find divergences. For
example, only Jaivin refers to the 1988 campus riots in which young
African men were attacked. In these incidents, some male Chinese
students--of the same Tiananmen generation that would soon do such
admirable things--lashed out against African males whose freer
lifestyles they envied. The rioters also expressed outrage at efforts by
the black exchange students to establish sexual liaisons with Chinese
women. That only Jaivin mentions these racist incidents is illustrative
of a general pattern. Zhao criticizes the Tiananmen generation for
strategic mistakes, factionalism and political immaturity but otherwise
veers toward hagiography. Jaivin takes a warts-and-all approach to her
heroes. Hou gets chided for egotism and sexism, and the students for
their tendency to be elitist (toward workers) and antiforeign (on
occasion even toward Westerners).

Surprisingly, given Jaivin's greater fascination with pop culture, among
the many events that she ignores but that Zhao mentions is the Jan and
Dean concert fracas. I was glad to see Zhao allude to this November 1986
event (few analysts of 1989 have), but found his comments problematic.
He states that demonstrations began in Shanghai "as a protest against
the arrest and beating of students after many students danced on the
stage" with the surf-rock band. Soon, the movement's focus shifted to
"democracy and other issues," Zhao continues, when news arrived of
campus unrest in Hefei (where Fang Lizhi taught). The protests there
were triggered by complaints about cafeteria food and manipulated local
elections. This is accurate but leaves out a significant twist: The buzz
around Shanghai campuses had a class-related dimension. Students
complained that concert security guards had treated their classmates
like mere "workers," not intellectuals-in-the-making, the flower of
China's youth. And while this sort of elitism was tempered a bit during
the 1989 mass movement, it never disappeared.

In the end, though, where Jaivin and Zhao really part company has to do
with something more basic than choices about whom to cite or even how
critical to be of activists. It comes from the fact that only one
(Jaivin) leaves space for magic. Zhao is influenced by a recent (and
welcome) development in social movement theory: a commitment to paying
more attention to emotion. And yet, in his hands, this emotional turn
amounts to only a minor shift in emphasis. It is as though, to him, a
sense of disgust or feelings of pride can be factored into existing
equations quite easily, without disrupting a basic approach that relies
heavily on assessing structural variables, the sway of formal ideologies
and rational calculations of risk.

In Jaivin's book, magic--of varying sorts--figures centrally. Even the
book's title is a nod toward the magical, since the "Monkey" in it
refers to the most famous trickster character in Chinese culture, the
mischief-loving hero of the novel Journey From the West, with
whom Hou apparently identifies. A major characteristic of Monkey (in the
novel) and Hou (in Jaivin's biography) is an ability to transform
himself and contribute to the transformation of others--something often
associated with spells of enchantment.

When it comes to the magical aspects of Tiananmen, Jaivin stresses the
"magnetic pull" (Barmé's term) that the square exerted. And she
emphasizes that the 1989 movement was full of unexpected developments
that perplexed even those who knew Chinese politics intimately. In
addition, she gives a good sense of how often people did peculiar,
seemingly contradictory things. For example, she writes that Hou was
convinced by late May that the students should leave the square before
the regime cleared it by force. Only by living on could they build on
what they had accomplished and continue to work to change China, he
felt, as did many others. And yet, Hou flew to Hong Kong, even though he
knew the funds raised by the concert there would help the students
extend their occupation of the square. He could never explain why he did
this, and I doubt any "model" can do justice to his choice. Moreover,
Hou was not the only one to find himself doing inexplicable things as
magic moments followed one another at a dizzying speed that spring.

Those who know little about Tiananmen can learn more from Zhao than from
Jaivin (even if they find her more fun to read). And specialists will
come away from his book with more new data. In the end, though, I think
Jaivin gets closer to the heart of 1989. I say this in part because I
agree with her on several points (the role of nationalism, for example).
But my main reason for preferring her book is my conviction that with
Tiananmen--and perhaps many mass movements--you have to take seriously
not just structures and calculations of interest but also passion and
magic.

]]>

A hundred days ago Wu’er Kaixi was a fugitive…. Yesterday, before an audience of 800 Americans and Chinese at Brandeis University, he showed what brought a 21-year-old Beijing Normal School student to the head of an earth-shaking movement. He sang a song about a wolf. And he told people who had listened to two days of often-ponderous analysis of the student movement that Chinese rock music composers Qin Qi of Taiwan and Cui Jian of mainland China were more important to the students than the dissident physicist Fang Lizhi… The auditorium buzzed with the gasps and whispers of delighted students and their bewildered elders. (Boston Globe, September 18, 1989)

John Sebastian’s famous lyric about the impossibility of “trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll” notwithstanding, it was a special moment indeed when Wu’er Kaixi–the flamboyant Tiananmen student leader–attempted to do just that. I know. I was one of the strangers who heard him sing Qin Qi’s “Wolf From the North” and explain what its celebration of individualism meant to his generation. The students agreed with senior dissidents that institutions must change, he said, but what they yearned for most was to live in a freer society. (The anniversary of the Beijing massacre recently passed, on June 4.)

When I witnessed Wu’er’s performance, even though I was no longer a student and even though I had misgivings about any single activist claiming to speak for the Tiananmen generation, I was definitely in the “delighted” camp. One reason was that I was in Shanghai in 1986 when demonstrations occurred that helped lay the groundwork for those of 1989. I was struck then by the Western media’s tendency to overstate the dissident Fang Lizhi’s impact. Students found his speeches inspiring, but other things also triggered protests: complaints about compulsory calisthenics, for example, and a scuffle at–of all things–a Jan and Dean concert.

Another reason Wu’er’s performance pleased me was that I was to give a presentation at Harvard the next evening and planned to talk about a song, albeit one without a backbeat: “Frère Jacques.” Why that one? Because Chinese youth often put new lyrics to it during pre-1949 protests, Red Guards did likewise in the 1960s and the Tiananmen protesters had just followed suit. Wu’er used a new song to argue for his generation’s uniqueness. But I used an old one to show how often he and others had reworked (albeit often unconsciously) a rich inherited tradition.

I also pointed out that the lyrics to the latest version of “Frère Jacques” (which began “Down With Li Peng, Down With Li Peng, Deng Xiaoping, Deng Xiaoping,” and which went on to refer to these and other Communist Party leaders as “bullies”) expressed contempt for corrupt, autocratic officials.

A desire for reform and personal freedom helped get students onto the streets–not just in Beijing but in scores of Chinese cities. A major reason that workers joined them there in such large numbers, though, was moral outrage, widespread disgust with power-holders whose attachment to the ideals of the Communist revolution of 1949 had seemingly disappeared completely. The country’s leaders now seemed only to care about protecting their privileged positions. And this meant, I argued, that there were topical as well as melodic links between 1989 and some protests of the first half of the century. During the civil war era (1945-49), for example, demonstrators criticized the ruling Nationalist Party’s leaders for being corrupt and abandoning the ideals of the revolution that had brought them to power.

In the many books on the events of 1989 published in Chinese and Western languages in the past dozen years, the uniqueness of the Tiananmen generation, the root causes of their activism and the songs that inspired them have all been handled in still different ways from the two just described. Most notably, when it comes to music, many Tiananmen books–including the two under review–have singled out for special attention one of two songs that neither Wu’er Kaixi nor I discussed. These are a Communist anthem (the “Internationale”) and a composition by Taiwan pop star Hou Dejian (“Heirs of the Dragon”). Students frequently sang these songs throughout the demonstrations of mid-April through late May. And each was sung a final time by the last group of students to leave Tiananmen Square on June 4, during a pre-dawn exodus that took them through the nearby streets, which had just been turned into killing fields by the People’s Liberation Army.

Zhao Dingxin’s The Power of Tiananmen is the latest in a long line of works to treat the “Internationale” as the movement’s most revealing song. He claims, in a section on “The Imprint of Communist Mass Mobilization,” that students were drawn to it because it is “rebellious in spirit” and because a steady diet of post-1949 party-sponsored “revolutionary dramas and films” in which the song figured had made singing it “a standard way of expressing” discontent with the status quo. In this section, as elsewhere in his study, Zhao stresses the importance of history in shaping 1989, but he sees only the preceding forty years as directly relevant. In contrast to my approach, which linked the pre-Communist and Communist eras, he distinguishes sharply between (nationalistic) pre-1949 protests and the (“pro-Western”) Tiananmen ones.

The Monkey and the Dragon mentions the “Internationale” and many other compositions (from Cui Jian’s rousing “Nothing to My Name” to the punk-rock song “Garbage Dump”), but the gently lilting “Heirs” gets most attention. This is to be expected. Linda Jaivin’s book is not a Tiananmen study per se (though 170 pages of it deal with 1989) but a biography of Hou Dejian. This fascinating singer-songwriter grew up in Taiwan and, while still in his 20s, saw “Heirs” become a hit (and be appropriated for political purposes) on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. Soon afterward, he surprised everyone (even close friends like Jaivin) by defecting to the mainland–only to quickly become a gadfly to the authorities there.

Hou ended up playing key roles in 1989 both as a songwriter (he penned a song for the movement, “Get Off the Stage,” which called on aging leaders like Deng to retire) and eventually as a direct participant. He stayed aloof from the movement at first, but from late May onward threw himself into it with abandon. In short order, he flew to Hong Kong to perform in a fundraiser, returned to Beijing to join other intellectuals in a hunger strike, then helped negotiate a temporary cease-fire that allowed that last group of youths to leave the square on June 4. In 1990 the party shipped him back across the strait, making him, as Jaivin puts it, with typical irreverence and stylistic flair, “the first Taiwan defector to be returned to sender.”

Patriotism is the central theme of “Heirs” (the “Dragon” in its title is China), and Jaivin argues that this explains the song’s appeal to a generation of Chinese students who (like many of their predecessors) saw themselves as charged with an epic mission to save their homeland from misrule. According to Jaivin, this patriotism occasionally blurred into a narrow jingoism of a sort that appalled Hou–particularly because his song was used to express it. Her discussion of “Heirs” thus plays up 1989’s nationalistic side and links it both backward (to pre-1949 struggles by youths determined to save their country) and forward (to such events as the anti-NATO demonstration that broke out when the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade was hit by US warplanes in 1999).

These opening comments on music are meant to convey three things. First, China’s 1989 was a complex, multifaceted struggle (not a simple “democracy” movement). Second, in part because of this, the events of that year remain open to competing interpretations, even among those of us who dismiss (as everyone should) Beijing’s self-serving “Big Lie” about the government’s supposed need to use force to pacify “counterrevolutionary” riots. Third–and this is a much more general point–providing a clear picture of a multifaceted movement is never easy.

This is because one has to grapple continually not only with big questions of interpretation but also numerous small ones of detail–right down to picking which songs to discuss. This is true whether the protesters in question are American or Chinese and whether the person doing the grappling is a former participant (like Wu’er), a cultural historian (like me), a dispassionate sociologist (like Zhao) or an impassioned, iconoclastic, frequently entertaining, often insightful and sometimes self-indulgent journalist-turned-novelist-turned-biographer (like Jaivin). Whatever the movement, whoever the writer, contrasting approaches to small matters can create big gaps in overall perspective.

Leaving China aside, consider how minor divergences can create major differences in presentations of an American student movement–that of the 1960s–depending on the answers given to the following questions: When exactly did this movement begin and end? Which student activists and which nonstudents (leaders of related struggles, radical philosophers, singers, politicians) had the largest impact? How much weight should we give to the protesters’ stated goals? How much to actions that contradicted these? Were countercultural elements central or peripheral to the movement? Give one set of answers and Abbie Hoffman gets a chapter to himself, but give another and he becomes a footnote. The same goes for everyone from Mario Savio to Malcolm X, Herbert Marcuse to Jane Fonda, Jimi Hendrix to Ronald Reagan. It also goes for such events as the Free Speech Movement (too early?), be-ins (irrelevant?) and the first gay-pride parades (too late?).

Accounts of student movements can also diverge, depending on the answers given to more basic questions. If one has complete data and knows a lot about “political opportunity structures” and “rational choice analysis,” can one explain all dimensions of a movement? Or will some things remain mysterious, such as the moment when a nonviolent event turns violent or the process by which a song or chant assumes talismanic properties? Do we need to leave room for spontaneous, even irrational individual choices? To put this another way, do we need to make analytic space for what might best be termed–for lack of a more precise word–magic? I mean by this both the black magic that transforms a group of individuals into a lynch mob and the glorious sort that leads to brave acts of inspiring heroism.

It may be true that the potential for divergence between accounts is unusually great in that particular case, due to the struggle’s protracted nature and connections to other upheavals, especially the civil rights movement. And yet, anyone who reads Zhao’s study and then Jaivin’s book may doubt this. Tiananmen was comparatively short-lived and self-contained, yet accounts of China’s 1989 spin off in dramatically different directions.

This is not to say that Zhao’s and Jaivin’s treatments of Tiananmen never converge. You could even claim that for works by such different authors–Jaivin’s previous writings include a rollicking novel called Eat Me, while Zhao’s peer-reviewed scholarly articles are peppered with charts and tables–their books have much in common. One author may rely on things she observed and was told in 1989, the other on interviews conducted later according to social scientific protocols, but some of their narrative choices are the same. For instance, each focuses tightly on Beijing as a site of protest (it was actually just one of many) and of state violence (there was also a massacre in Chengdu). And each pays relatively little attention to workers.

Still, it is the divergences between the discussions of 1989 that remain most striking. There are people Jaivin discusses in detail (Cui Jian) who are not even listed in Zhao’s index. And there are aspects of the struggle analyzed insightfully by Zhao that are ignored by Jaivin–what Zhao calls “campus ecology” (the physical structures and social patterns of student life) for instance. His treatment of the way this shaped 1989 is excellent, yet the topic falls outside the scope of Jaivin’s interests.

The two authors also treat previous studies very differently. Take sociologist Craig Calhoun’s justly acclaimed 1994 study Neither Gods Nor Emperors. Zhao cites it several times (sometimes approvingly, sometimes to criticize Calhoun for making too much of 1989’s links to pre-1949 events and patterns); Jaivin never mentions it. On the other hand, she draws heavily on works by Geremie Barmé, a leading Australian China specialist whom Zhao never cites. Jaivin’s reliance on Barmé is no surprise: The two co-edited a superb Tiananmen-related document collection, New Ghosts, Old Dreams, were married for a time (Monkey includes a diverting account of their courtship) and remain close friends. What is surprising is that none of Barmé’s writings are listed in Zhao’s bibliography. This wouldn’t matter except that some specialists (myself included) think him among the most consistently insightful and on-target analysts of Chinese culture and politics.

Switching from references to events, we again find divergences. For example, only Jaivin refers to the 1988 campus riots in which young African men were attacked. In these incidents, some male Chinese students–of the same Tiananmen generation that would soon do such admirable things–lashed out against African males whose freer lifestyles they envied. The rioters also expressed outrage at efforts by the black exchange students to establish sexual liaisons with Chinese women. That only Jaivin mentions these racist incidents is illustrative of a general pattern. Zhao criticizes the Tiananmen generation for strategic mistakes, factionalism and political immaturity but otherwise veers toward hagiography. Jaivin takes a warts-and-all approach to her heroes. Hou gets chided for egotism and sexism, and the students for their tendency to be elitist (toward workers) and antiforeign (on occasion even toward Westerners).

Surprisingly, given Jaivin’s greater fascination with pop culture, among the many events that she ignores but that Zhao mentions is the Jan and Dean concert fracas. I was glad to see Zhao allude to this November 1986 event (few analysts of 1989 have), but found his comments problematic. He states that demonstrations began in Shanghai “as a protest against the arrest and beating of students after many students danced on the stage” with the surf-rock band. Soon, the movement’s focus shifted to “democracy and other issues,” Zhao continues, when news arrived of campus unrest in Hefei (where Fang Lizhi taught). The protests there were triggered by complaints about cafeteria food and manipulated local elections. This is accurate but leaves out a significant twist: The buzz around Shanghai campuses had a class-related dimension. Students complained that concert security guards had treated their classmates like mere “workers,” not intellectuals-in-the-making, the flower of China’s youth. And while this sort of elitism was tempered a bit during the 1989 mass movement, it never disappeared.

In the end, though, where Jaivin and Zhao really part company has to do with something more basic than choices about whom to cite or even how critical to be of activists. It comes from the fact that only one (Jaivin) leaves space for magic. Zhao is influenced by a recent (and welcome) development in social movement theory: a commitment to paying more attention to emotion. And yet, in his hands, this emotional turn amounts to only a minor shift in emphasis. It is as though, to him, a sense of disgust or feelings of pride can be factored into existing equations quite easily, without disrupting a basic approach that relies heavily on assessing structural variables, the sway of formal ideologies and rational calculations of risk.

In Jaivin’s book, magic–of varying sorts–figures centrally. Even the book’s title is a nod toward the magical, since the “Monkey” in it refers to the most famous trickster character in Chinese culture, the mischief-loving hero of the novel Journey From the West, with whom Hou apparently identifies. A major characteristic of Monkey (in the novel) and Hou (in Jaivin’s biography) is an ability to transform himself and contribute to the transformation of others–something often associated with spells of enchantment.

When it comes to the magical aspects of Tiananmen, Jaivin stresses the “magnetic pull” (Barmé’s term) that the square exerted. And she emphasizes that the 1989 movement was full of unexpected developments that perplexed even those who knew Chinese politics intimately. In addition, she gives a good sense of how often people did peculiar, seemingly contradictory things. For example, she writes that Hou was convinced by late May that the students should leave the square before the regime cleared it by force. Only by living on could they build on what they had accomplished and continue to work to change China, he felt, as did many others. And yet, Hou flew to Hong Kong, even though he knew the funds raised by the concert there would help the students extend their occupation of the square. He could never explain why he did this, and I doubt any “model” can do justice to his choice. Moreover, Hou was not the only one to find himself doing inexplicable things as magic moments followed one another at a dizzying speed that spring.

Those who know little about Tiananmen can learn more from Zhao than from Jaivin (even if they find her more fun to read). And specialists will come away from his book with more new data. In the end, though, I think Jaivin gets closer to the heart of 1989. I say this in part because I agree with her on several points (the role of nationalism, for example). But my main reason for preferring her book is my conviction that with Tiananmen–and perhaps many mass movements–you have to take seriously not just structures and calculations of interest but also passion and magic.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/backbeat-china/Human Rights and Diplomatic Wrongshttps://www.thenation.com/article/human-rights-and-diplomatic-wrongs/Rian Thum,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Gina Anne Tam,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Denise Y. Ho,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Kate Merkel-Hess,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey WasserstromSep 20, 2001
The composition of the UN's Commission on Human Rights changes annually, since a third of the seats are up for grabs each year. Elections, which take place in the spring, determine which countries will be granted new three-year terms and which will cycle off come December 31. Ever since the body was founded in 1947, however, there have been three constant firmaments in this otherwise ever-changing galaxy. There have always been seats held by India, Russia and the United States. But this tradition will come to a halt next January 1: India's and Russia's representatives will still be there, but an American one will not.The United States was voted off the Commission on Human Rights this past spring. It also lost its place on the UN body that monitors the international drug trade.

Whenever there is a break from a long-standing pattern, it is tempting to focus on short-term causes. Critics of the new Administration are eager to see these two votes as a negative judgment on its unilateral approach to the arms race, cold war nostalgia and reversal of course on the Kyoto Protocols on global warming. Defenders of President George W. Bush, meanwhile, stress bad timing: The UN elections came while China was upset about the Administration's "tough" (though,to some hawks, not tough enough) handling of the spy-plane incident and while tensions in the Middle East were rising--something that presumably encouraged Arab states to join Beijing in voting against the United States.

However, one thing that the books under review make clear, each in its own way, is the need to place the issue in a long-term perspective. For example, Oxford-based diplomatic historian Rosemary Foot reminds us in Rights Beyond Borders that tensions between China and the United States were playing themselves out in Geneva, where the Commission on Human Rights meets, long before the term EP-3 became known to the American public. Moreover, as Robert Drinan (a Jesuit priest and former Democratic Congressman) and Noam Chomsky show in The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States , respectively, too much can be made of the novelties of the new Bush Administration's policies.

Before going any further, let me stress that I do not mean to suggest that Drinan, much less Chomsky, is a fan of George II's approach to international affairs. Even though The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States were completed before George W. began exerting influence in foreign policy, after all, there is plenty of criticism in both of an Administration that contained some of the same key players and was motivated by the same guiding principles as this one: his father's. For example, Drinan laments that during the "twelve years of the Reagan-Bush administrations," the United States was not "aggressively proactive" in the "defense of human rights." Chomsky is blunter: It is odd, he claims, that though Reagan and Bush liked to think of themselves as "guardians of global order," both had "unusually warm relations" with dictators, including some, such as Saddam Hussein, they would eventually come to call "mass murderers."

In other words, tempting as it might have been for Drinan and Chomsky to place the blame for the commission votes at the feet of the new President, neither would do so if given the opportunity, nor would they even say that only Republican administrations have been at fault. Why? Because both see enduring flaws in Washington's approach to human rights, flaws that transcend the Democrat-Republican divide. Drinan, not surprisingly, has more positive things to say about some Democratic leaders of the past than does Chomsky. Drinan praises Jimmy Carter, for example, for delivering speeches on freedom that "gave hope and inspiration to countless dissidents" and helped "the idea of human rights to enter the political and moral coinage of the nation and to some extent of the world." Nevertheless, Drinan, like Chomsky, argues that for decades there has been too little consistency and too much hubris in the American handling of human rights no matter who has occupied the Oval Office.

The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States are, of course, very dissimilar books, as anyone familiar with the careers of the authors would expect. They differ in style: The former is more personal, the latter more extensively documented. They differ in emphasis: Drinan has more to say about religious freedom. And they differ in terminology: Only Chomsky says that the label "rogue state" can be logically applied to the United States as well as countries such as Iraq. Chomsky's basis for this provocative claim is that, in its "literal" as opposed to merely "propagandistic" sense, the term "rogue state" refers to those that feel free to override the directives of international bodies and "do not regard themselves as bound by international norms." By this standard, the Reagan Administration behaved like a "rogue state" regime when it denied the validity of a world court decision favoring Nicaragua, and the Clinton Administration did the same when it claimed NATO was free to act independently of the UN in Kosovo. Chomsky cites other past instances of military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East as further evidence of a US tendency to take unilateral action that has far too often run amok. Drinan, though also critical of unilateralism, stops far short of calling the United States a "rogue state."

Still, when it comes to US Human Rights policies, there are important points of convergence between the two authors beyond a shared conviction that both Democratic and Republican administrations have erred. And they differ in emphasis: Chomsky says much more about military intervention, less about religious freedom.

For example, neither Drinan nor Chomsky accepts the notion all too commonly taken for granted here (though not in Europe, let alone China) that Washington's vision of human rights has always been that articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Each stresses, on the contrary, that Washington frequently shows disdain for two central tenets of that great UN document. First, that social and economic freedoms, on the one hand, and political and civil rights, on the other, should be accorded similar status. Second, that the Universal Declaration represents many different rights traditions, hence no single nation has a special claim as its main progenitor. Washington has flouted these ideas by signing covenants dealing with political and civil rights but refusing to do the same for ones dealing with social and economic freedoms, and by treating the Universal Declaration as just an updated version of our Bill of Rights.

To appreciate fully these criticisms by Drinan and Chomsky, it is useful to supplement their discussions of UN documents with those of Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School. I am thinking here of her elegant new study, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of her pathbreaking 1998 Notre Dame Law Review essay on the subject, which Chomsky draws on in Rogue States. Glendon stresses that the first incarnation of the Commission on Human Rights, which was responsible for creating the Universal Declaration, was a cosmopolitan group, the members of which were influenced by and spoke for diverse traditions. On the commission were not just an American social reformer and former First Lady but also a Confucian intellectual, a French legal scholar and a Lebanese philosopher. On it also sat Mehta Hansa, the female delegate from India who convinced the group to avoid gendered language and refer to the rights that "all human beings," not just "all men," deserve.

Glendon stresses that the UN's 1948 document champions a holistic vision of human rights that owes much to the precedents set by the declarations of 1776 and 1789 but is not reflective only of Anglo-American and French traditions. She also emphasizes the concerted effort Eleanor Roosevelt and others made to insure that protection of "second generation" rights (for example, to shelter and decent working conditions) was considered a central feature of their document.

Drinan and Chomsky both find much to admire in the Universal Declaration's holistic approach to rights, something taken still further in the Vienna Declaration of 1993, which emerged from a conference the former attended as a delegate. To be sure, Drinan's optimism and Chomsky's pessimism concerning contemporary political conditions colors their comments on the Universal Declaration. Drinan calls it "the most important legal document in the history of the world" and celebrates the fact that the ideals proclaimed in it and in other UN documents have given rise to an "astonishing dream." Despite the horrors of the past half-century, he writes, "the progress and advancement in the area of human rights since 1945 has actually been more spectacular than might have been expected or even imagined." Chomsky strikes a more somber tone in a pair of essays, reprinted in Rogue States , that were written to mark the Universal Declaration's fiftieth anniversary. For example, he begins one by saying that so many people continue to suffer unjustly that admirers of the document should think of the famous Confucian adage that described the Master as the sort of virtuous person "who keeps trying although he knows that it is in vain."

There is no disagreement between these two authors, however, when it comes to the importance of the Universal Declaration's refusal to relegate social and economic rights to a secondary status. Both insist, like Glendon, that the United States has failed to live up to the spirit of 1948 by unduly privileging, in its practice and rhetoric, those political and civil rights that loom particularly large in the American tradition. Drinan and Chomsky also take issue with US resistance to the idea, which many in other countries argue is a direct extension of the logic of the Universal Declaration, that the "right to development" is fundamental. Each might also have stressed,as Glendon does, that downplaying material concerns marks a divergence from the ideals propounded by the husband of the best-known drafter of the Universal Declaration: Freedom from want was one the "Four Freedoms" Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous speech.

A different sort of American inconsistency also worries Drinan and Chomsky: Washington's tendency to use different criteria when judging the records of allies as opposed to enemies or competitors. Chomsky is at his best when elaborating on this theme, detailing the many abuses that have been committed by countries supported by or working with the United States to which US political leaders turned a blind eye. Always on the lookout for diplomatic double standards, he finds much grist for his mill here, particularly where Latin America is concerned. He continually contrasts criticisms leveled at Castro with things left unsaid about nearby right-wing authoritarian regimes.

Drinan uses Latin American examples to similar effect. A central theme, for instance, in his discussion of the Fraser Bill is that this admirable piece of mid-1970s legislation, which called for human rights concerns to be made more central to American foreign policy decisions, was inspired by anger over the 1973 coup in Chile. According to Drinan, hearings on the US role in the fall of Allende and rise of Pinochet led members of Congress to feel "embarrassed that the United States in its struggle to stop Soviet aggression ended up arming dictators because they were enemies of our enemy."

These Latin American contrasts work well, but East Asian ones could have done the same rhetorical job. Take, for example, the very different US responses to the Kwangju massacre of 1980 and the Beijing massacre of 1989, events that had much in common. Whether Washington responded vigorously enough to the latter is an open question, though my own feeling remains that the decision to send informal envoys to China within a few months of the June 4killings undermined the efficacy of the first Bush Administration's 1989 censure of Beijing. What is unquestionable is that more was done to show displeasure with the Chinese Communist Party leadership than had been done nine years earlier vis-à-vis South Korea's right-wing authoritarian government.

The contrast relating to the Olympics is particularly stark. In the early 1990s some American politicians insisted that the honor of hosting the 2000 Games should not go to any country that did not hold free elections or had leaders whose hands were stained by the blood of a massacre. Whatever the merits of this argument--a variation of which was heard again in recent months in debates over China's successful bid to host the 2008 Games--it is worth noting that every part of it would have applied to South Korea in the early 1980s. Yet no senator or representative seems to have been troubled then by the idea that Seoul was being considered to host the 1988 Games. In this kind of contrasting response to similar acts of brutality and the assumption that Washington should determine where the Olympic Games are held, even though an international body makes the call, we get a sense of why the recent UN votes went as they did. It is definitely true, as some commentators have noted, that many countries that are much less free than this one will have seats on the Commission on Human Rights next year. At voting time, however, a country's domestic record may matter a good deal less than patterns associated with its handling of international issues.

After reading either The Mobilization of Shame or Rogue States, it becomes abundantly clear that pride certainly went before this particular fall, as did sharp divergences between rhetoric and practice. And the United States has other Achilles' heels as well where human rights are concerned. For example, with China, we are among a dwindling number of countries that conduct executions, something many people in Europe and elsewhere consider a human rights abuse. And even though a central part of human rights ideology is that all lives are of equal value, we often seem disproportionately concerned with the plight of those victims abroad with whom we can most easily identify. Hence the frequent misremembering of the Beijing massacre as an event in which those who died were students lobbying for democracy and carrying banners emblazoned with GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH and similar slogans. In fact, the majority of those killed were workers who had turned out to support the students, largely because of a shared disgust at official corruption.

Should we then see the latest vote for the Commission on Human Rights as a long-overdue wake-up call for a country with a distorted national self-image as a global champion of human rights and clearsighted interpreter of the Universal Declaration? There is something to be said for this notion. And yet, as Rights Beyond Borders shows, there is at least one good reason to lament the loss of a US presence on the commission: While Foot is no apologist for Washington, she does draw attention to the positive things that have come from US efforts in Geneva and elsewhere to bring pressure to bear on Beijing over its record of human rights abuses.

Foot's main interest, unlike Drinan's and Chomsky's, is not the United States, I should stress, but China; so policies and rhetoric emanating from Washington become relevant to her only through the way they are understood in or affect Beijing. Still, in her discussion of China, Chinese-American disputes relating to human rights loom large. Her overall argument, though made with considerable subtlety, can be summarized as follows. Even though the Chinese Communist Party continues to perpetrate many abuses, positive developments have taken place in recent years that, when taken together, mean that many citizens of China now live more freely than they formerly did. Helping these changes along has been Beijing's increasing "enmeshment" in an international human rights regime. And US criticism has facilitated this enmeshment.

Foot sees in China a nearly perfect test case for the proposition that acceptance of international norms really does matter. Few people outside the Chinese Communist Party's inner circle would dispute the claim that serious human rights abuses continue to occur in China. It is also, however, clearly a country that has undergone a dramatic transformation of late where the discourse of human rights is concerned. Twenty-five years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, the official line was still that this was a bourgeois document designed to cloak the predations of capitalists and imperialists. To speak positively of renquan (human rights) was to risk being dubbed a lackey or a traitor. By 1998, however, the Universal Declaration's fiftieth anniversary was treated in Beijing as a moment for celebration and reflection on the state of an international human rights project of which China considered itself a part. Foot argues that this discursive shift matters. It helped improve some lives and, perhaps more significant in the long run, was accompanied by institutional developments.

One thing she finds promising is that Beijing has shifted from denouncing the Commission on Human Rights to seeking a vigorous voice within it. This is a clear indication that Beijing "has moved--or been shoved--along a winding and bumpy path" toward full integration into a global human rights regime. The diffusion of "human rights norms is neither linear, nor incapable of being periodically halted," she admits, but when "viewed over the longer term, and despite the recent political chill in China, global criticism of China's human rights record" has had positive effects. For example, an "infrastructure that can help to protect human rights has begun to be built, and it stands ready to be drawn upon in the advent of progressive political reform."

American pressure on China has played a role in the growth of this "infrastructure," according to Foot, and has sometimes led as well to specific positive moves, such as the release from prison of prominent dissidents and the signing of UN accords. Once Beijing accepted international human rights standards--even with caveats regarding China's supposedly special status as a less developed country that subscribes to "Asian values"--the ground began to shift beneath the Chinese Communist Party's feet. The government has been forced to develop more sophisticated excuses for its failures, train more specialists in fields like international law, translate more Western works on human rights into Chinese, and so forth. This, at least, is Foot's argument, and she makes it very well. The United States cannot take all the credit for these changes, but Washington's role in doing such things as sponsoring motions in Geneva calling for censure of Beijing has been significant. This is true even though such motions have always been defeated in the end, and even though one result of China's "enmeshment" has been that Chinese counterattacks on the United States as a land of inequality and racial injustice have become much more sophisticated.

Foot's study, though it makes important points and manages to be both scholarly and readable, is marred by one thing: It focuses almost exclusively upon political and civil rights. This choice is understandable. When the global community has criticized Beijing, the tendency has been to emphasize issues like the limits placed on speech, political dissent and religious behavior. Nevertheless, paying more attention to social and economic rights would have made Foot's book even better in two significant ways. It would have put it more in sync with the spirit of 1948, and it would have helped us come to terms with a major new issue: namely, more than two decades into Beijing's Reform Era, during which the government has been slow to replace old social welfare mechanisms with new ones, some of the biggest human rights problems concern social and economic freedoms.

All this suggests that the human rights challenge brought into focus by the recent UN vote is a multifaceted one. In the United States there is a need to find ways to criticize Beijing (and other governments with abhorrent human rights records) that are less hypocritical, patronizing and self-serving. Doing this may even help us regain representation at the Commission on Human Rights. Meanwhile, other countries must pick up the slack in insuring that China continues to be pushed along the "bumpy" road leading to full enmeshment. And Americans concerned with Chinese affairs might do well to follow the lead of NGOs like Human Rights Watch and start paying more attention to social and economic issues. We would do well to combine pleas for the release of persecuted dissidents and Falun Gong members with expressions of outrage over the mistreatment of other vulnerable groups. The most notable of these, perhaps, are the many migrant workers who have poured into Chinese cities only to find themselves in the ironic predicament of being exploited and treated like second-class citizens in a land where the proletariat was supposed to reign supreme.

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The composition of the UN’s Commission on Human Rights changes annually, since a third of the seats are up for grabs each year. Elections, which take place in the spring, determine which countries will be granted new three-year terms and which will cycle off come December 31. Ever since the body was founded in 1947, however, there have been three constant firmaments in this otherwise ever-changing galaxy. There have always been seats held by India, Russia and the United States. But this tradition will come to a halt next January 1: India’s and Russia’s representatives will still be there, but an American one will not.The United States was voted off the Commission on Human Rights this past spring. It also lost its place on the UN body that monitors the international drug trade.

Whenever there is a break from a long-standing pattern, it is tempting to focus on short-term causes. Critics of the new Administration are eager to see these two votes as a negative judgment on its unilateral approach to the arms race, cold war nostalgia and reversal of course on the Kyoto Protocols on global warming. Defenders of President George W. Bush, meanwhile, stress bad timing: The UN elections came while China was upset about the Administration’s “tough” (though,to some hawks, not tough enough) handling of the spy-plane incident and while tensions in the Middle East were rising–something that presumably encouraged Arab states to join Beijing in voting against the United States.

However, one thing that the books under review make clear, each in its own way, is the need to place the issue in a long-term perspective. For example, Oxford-based diplomatic historian Rosemary Foot reminds us in Rights Beyond Borders that tensions between China and the United States were playing themselves out in Geneva, where the Commission on Human Rights meets, long before the term EP-3 became known to the American public. Moreover, as Robert Drinan (a Jesuit priest and former Democratic Congressman) and Noam Chomsky show in The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States , respectively, too much can be made of the novelties of the new Bush Administration’s policies.

Before going any further, let me stress that I do not mean to suggest that Drinan, much less Chomsky, is a fan of George II’s approach to international affairs. Even though The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States were completed before George W. began exerting influence in foreign policy, after all, there is plenty of criticism in both of an Administration that contained some of the same key players and was motivated by the same guiding principles as this one: his father’s. For example, Drinan laments that during the “twelve years of the Reagan-Bush administrations,” the United States was not “aggressively proactive” in the “defense of human rights.” Chomsky is blunter: It is odd, he claims, that though Reagan and Bush liked to think of themselves as “guardians of global order,” both had “unusually warm relations” with dictators, including some, such as Saddam Hussein, they would eventually come to call “mass murderers.”

In other words, tempting as it might have been for Drinan and Chomsky to place the blame for the commission votes at the feet of the new President, neither would do so if given the opportunity, nor would they even say that only Republican administrations have been at fault. Why? Because both see enduring flaws in Washington’s approach to human rights, flaws that transcend the Democrat-Republican divide. Drinan, not surprisingly, has more positive things to say about some Democratic leaders of the past than does Chomsky. Drinan praises Jimmy Carter, for example, for delivering speeches on freedom that “gave hope and inspiration to countless dissidents” and helped “the idea of human rights to enter the political and moral coinage of the nation and to some extent of the world.” Nevertheless, Drinan, like Chomsky, argues that for decades there has been too little consistency and too much hubris in the American handling of human rights no matter who has occupied the Oval Office.

The Mobilization of Shame and Rogue States are, of course, very dissimilar books, as anyone familiar with the careers of the authors would expect. They differ in style: The former is more personal, the latter more extensively documented. They differ in emphasis: Drinan has more to say about religious freedom. And they differ in terminology: Only Chomsky says that the label “rogue state” can be logically applied to the United States as well as countries such as Iraq. Chomsky’s basis for this provocative claim is that, in its “literal” as opposed to merely “propagandistic” sense, the term “rogue state” refers to those that feel free to override the directives of international bodies and “do not regard themselves as bound by international norms.” By this standard, the Reagan Administration behaved like a “rogue state” regime when it denied the validity of a world court decision favoring Nicaragua, and the Clinton Administration did the same when it claimed NATO was free to act independently of the UN in Kosovo. Chomsky cites other past instances of military intervention in Southeast Asia and the Middle East as further evidence of a US tendency to take unilateral action that has far too often run amok. Drinan, though also critical of unilateralism, stops far short of calling the United States a “rogue state.”

Still, when it comes to US Human Rights policies, there are important points of convergence between the two authors beyond a shared conviction that both Democratic and Republican administrations have erred. And they differ in emphasis: Chomsky says much more about military intervention, less about religious freedom.

For example, neither Drinan nor Chomsky accepts the notion all too commonly taken for granted here (though not in Europe, let alone China) that Washington’s vision of human rights has always been that articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Each stresses, on the contrary, that Washington frequently shows disdain for two central tenets of that great UN document. First, that social and economic freedoms, on the one hand, and political and civil rights, on the other, should be accorded similar status. Second, that the Universal Declaration represents many different rights traditions, hence no single nation has a special claim as its main progenitor. Washington has flouted these ideas by signing covenants dealing with political and civil rights but refusing to do the same for ones dealing with social and economic freedoms, and by treating the Universal Declaration as just an updated version of our Bill of Rights.

To appreciate fully these criticisms by Drinan and Chomsky, it is useful to supplement their discussions of UN documents with those of Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard Law School. I am thinking here of her elegant new study, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and of her pathbreaking 1998 Notre Dame Law Review essay on the subject, which Chomsky draws on in Rogue States. Glendon stresses that the first incarnation of the Commission on Human Rights, which was responsible for creating the Universal Declaration, was a cosmopolitan group, the members of which were influenced by and spoke for diverse traditions. On the commission were not just an American social reformer and former First Lady but also a Confucian intellectual, a French legal scholar and a Lebanese philosopher. On it also sat Mehta Hansa, the female delegate from India who convinced the group to avoid gendered language and refer to the rights that “all human beings,” not just “all men,” deserve.

Glendon stresses that the UN’s 1948 document champions a holistic vision of human rights that owes much to the precedents set by the declarations of 1776 and 1789 but is not reflective only of Anglo-American and French traditions. She also emphasizes the concerted effort Eleanor Roosevelt and others made to insure that protection of “second generation” rights (for example, to shelter and decent working conditions) was considered a central feature of their document.

Drinan and Chomsky both find much to admire in the Universal Declaration’s holistic approach to rights, something taken still further in the Vienna Declaration of 1993, which emerged from a conference the former attended as a delegate. To be sure, Drinan’s optimism and Chomsky’s pessimism concerning contemporary political conditions colors their comments on the Universal Declaration. Drinan calls it “the most important legal document in the history of the world” and celebrates the fact that the ideals proclaimed in it and in other UN documents have given rise to an “astonishing dream.” Despite the horrors of the past half-century, he writes, “the progress and advancement in the area of human rights since 1945 has actually been more spectacular than might have been expected or even imagined.” Chomsky strikes a more somber tone in a pair of essays, reprinted in Rogue States , that were written to mark the Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary. For example, he begins one by saying that so many people continue to suffer unjustly that admirers of the document should think of the famous Confucian adage that described the Master as the sort of virtuous person “who keeps trying although he knows that it is in vain.”

There is no disagreement between these two authors, however, when it comes to the importance of the Universal Declaration’s refusal to relegate social and economic rights to a secondary status. Both insist, like Glendon, that the United States has failed to live up to the spirit of 1948 by unduly privileging, in its practice and rhetoric, those political and civil rights that loom particularly large in the American tradition. Drinan and Chomsky also take issue with US resistance to the idea, which many in other countries argue is a direct extension of the logic of the Universal Declaration, that the “right to development” is fundamental. Each might also have stressed,as Glendon does, that downplaying material concerns marks a divergence from the ideals propounded by the husband of the best-known drafter of the Universal Declaration: Freedom from want was one the “Four Freedoms” Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous speech.

A different sort of American inconsistency also worries Drinan and Chomsky: Washington’s tendency to use different criteria when judging the records of allies as opposed to enemies or competitors. Chomsky is at his best when elaborating on this theme, detailing the many abuses that have been committed by countries supported by or working with the United States to which US political leaders turned a blind eye. Always on the lookout for diplomatic double standards, he finds much grist for his mill here, particularly where Latin America is concerned. He continually contrasts criticisms leveled at Castro with things left unsaid about nearby right-wing authoritarian regimes.

Drinan uses Latin American examples to similar effect. A central theme, for instance, in his discussion of the Fraser Bill is that this admirable piece of mid-1970s legislation, which called for human rights concerns to be made more central to American foreign policy decisions, was inspired by anger over the 1973 coup in Chile. According to Drinan, hearings on the US role in the fall of Allende and rise of Pinochet led members of Congress to feel “embarrassed that the United States in its struggle to stop Soviet aggression ended up arming dictators because they were enemies of our enemy.”

These Latin American contrasts work well, but East Asian ones could have done the same rhetorical job. Take, for example, the very different US responses to the Kwangju massacre of 1980 and the Beijing massacre of 1989, events that had much in common. Whether Washington responded vigorously enough to the latter is an open question, though my own feeling remains that the decision to send informal envoys to China within a few months of the June 4killings undermined the efficacy of the first Bush Administration’s 1989 censure of Beijing. What is unquestionable is that more was done to show displeasure with the Chinese Communist Party leadership than had been done nine years earlier vis-à-vis South Korea’s right-wing authoritarian government.

The contrast relating to the Olympics is particularly stark. In the early 1990s some American politicians insisted that the honor of hosting the 2000 Games should not go to any country that did not hold free elections or had leaders whose hands were stained by the blood of a massacre. Whatever the merits of this argument–a variation of which was heard again in recent months in debates over China’s successful bid to host the 2008 Games–it is worth noting that every part of it would have applied to South Korea in the early 1980s. Yet no senator or representative seems to have been troubled then by the idea that Seoul was being considered to host the 1988 Games. In this kind of contrasting response to similar acts of brutality and the assumption that Washington should determine where the Olympic Games are held, even though an international body makes the call, we get a sense of why the recent UN votes went as they did. It is definitely true, as some commentators have noted, that many countries that are much less free than this one will have seats on the Commission on Human Rights next year. At voting time, however, a country’s domestic record may matter a good deal less than patterns associated with its handling of international issues.

After reading either The Mobilization of Shame or Rogue States, it becomes abundantly clear that pride certainly went before this particular fall, as did sharp divergences between rhetoric and practice. And the United States has other Achilles’ heels as well where human rights are concerned. For example, with China, we are among a dwindling number of countries that conduct executions, something many people in Europe and elsewhere consider a human rights abuse. And even though a central part of human rights ideology is that all lives are of equal value, we often seem disproportionately concerned with the plight of those victims abroad with whom we can most easily identify. Hence the frequent misremembering of the Beijing massacre as an event in which those who died were students lobbying for democracy and carrying banners emblazoned with GIVE ME LIBERTY OR GIVE ME DEATH and similar slogans. In fact, the majority of those killed were workers who had turned out to support the students, largely because of a shared disgust at official corruption.

Should we then see the latest vote for the Commission on Human Rights as a long-overdue wake-up call for a country with a distorted national self-image as a global champion of human rights and clearsighted interpreter of the Universal Declaration? There is something to be said for this notion. And yet, as Rights Beyond Borders shows, there is at least one good reason to lament the loss of a US presence on the commission: While Foot is no apologist for Washington, she does draw attention to the positive things that have come from US efforts in Geneva and elsewhere to bring pressure to bear on Beijing over its record of human rights abuses.

Foot’s main interest, unlike Drinan’s and Chomsky’s, is not the United States, I should stress, but China; so policies and rhetoric emanating from Washington become relevant to her only through the way they are understood in or affect Beijing. Still, in her discussion of China, Chinese-American disputes relating to human rights loom large. Her overall argument, though made with considerable subtlety, can be summarized as follows. Even though the Chinese Communist Party continues to perpetrate many abuses, positive developments have taken place in recent years that, when taken together, mean that many citizens of China now live more freely than they formerly did. Helping these changes along has been Beijing’s increasing “enmeshment” in an international human rights regime. And US criticism has facilitated this enmeshment.

Foot sees in China a nearly perfect test case for the proposition that acceptance of international norms really does matter. Few people outside the Chinese Communist Party’s inner circle would dispute the claim that serious human rights abuses continue to occur in China. It is also, however, clearly a country that has undergone a dramatic transformation of late where the discourse of human rights is concerned. Twenty-five years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration, the official line was still that this was a bourgeois document designed to cloak the predations of capitalists and imperialists. To speak positively of renquan (human rights) was to risk being dubbed a lackey or a traitor. By 1998, however, the Universal Declaration’s fiftieth anniversary was treated in Beijing as a moment for celebration and reflection on the state of an international human rights project of which China considered itself a part. Foot argues that this discursive shift matters. It helped improve some lives and, perhaps more significant in the long run, was accompanied by institutional developments.

One thing she finds promising is that Beijing has shifted from denouncing the Commission on Human Rights to seeking a vigorous voice within it. This is a clear indication that Beijing “has moved–or been shoved–along a winding and bumpy path” toward full integration into a global human rights regime. The diffusion of “human rights norms is neither linear, nor incapable of being periodically halted,” she admits, but when “viewed over the longer term, and despite the recent political chill in China, global criticism of China’s human rights record” has had positive effects. For example, an “infrastructure that can help to protect human rights has begun to be built, and it stands ready to be drawn upon in the advent of progressive political reform.”

American pressure on China has played a role in the growth of this “infrastructure,” according to Foot, and has sometimes led as well to specific positive moves, such as the release from prison of prominent dissidents and the signing of UN accords. Once Beijing accepted international human rights standards–even with caveats regarding China’s supposedly special status as a less developed country that subscribes to “Asian values”–the ground began to shift beneath the Chinese Communist Party’s feet. The government has been forced to develop more sophisticated excuses for its failures, train more specialists in fields like international law, translate more Western works on human rights into Chinese, and so forth. This, at least, is Foot’s argument, and she makes it very well. The United States cannot take all the credit for these changes, but Washington’s role in doing such things as sponsoring motions in Geneva calling for censure of Beijing has been significant. This is true even though such motions have always been defeated in the end, and even though one result of China’s “enmeshment” has been that Chinese counterattacks on the United States as a land of inequality and racial injustice have become much more sophisticated.

Foot’s study, though it makes important points and manages to be both scholarly and readable, is marred by one thing: It focuses almost exclusively upon political and civil rights. This choice is understandable. When the global community has criticized Beijing, the tendency has been to emphasize issues like the limits placed on speech, political dissent and religious behavior. Nevertheless, paying more attention to social and economic rights would have made Foot’s book even better in two significant ways. It would have put it more in sync with the spirit of 1948, and it would have helped us come to terms with a major new issue: namely, more than two decades into Beijing’s Reform Era, during which the government has been slow to replace old social welfare mechanisms with new ones, some of the biggest human rights problems concern social and economic freedoms.

All this suggests that the human rights challenge brought into focus by the recent UN vote is a multifaceted one. In the United States there is a need to find ways to criticize Beijing (and other governments with abhorrent human rights records) that are less hypocritical, patronizing and self-serving. Doing this may even help us regain representation at the Commission on Human Rights. Meanwhile, other countries must pick up the slack in insuring that China continues to be pushed along the “bumpy” road leading to full enmeshment. And Americans concerned with Chinese affairs might do well to follow the lead of NGOs like Human Rights Watch and start paying more attention to social and economic issues. We would do well to combine pleas for the release of persecuted dissidents and Falun Gong members with expressions of outrage over the mistreatment of other vulnerable groups. The most notable of these, perhaps, are the many migrant workers who have poured into Chinese cities only to find themselves in the ironic predicament of being exploited and treated like second-class citizens in a land where the proletariat was supposed to reign supreme.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/human-rights-and-diplomatic-wrongs/China: Beyond the Matrixhttps://www.thenation.com/article/china-beyond-matrix/Rian Thum,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Gina Anne Tam,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Denise Y. Ho,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Kate Merkel-Hess,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey Wasserstrom,Jeffrey WasserstromApr 19, 2001
Bill Clinton and George Will so rarely agree with each other that when they embrace the same position, we should be alarmed. This thought came to mind upon realizing that their stances on the Internet and China are interchangeable--despite Clinton's favoring a softer political line than Will on Beijing. When it comes to the web, both espouse what might best be dubbed a neo-McLuhanite approach, or a form of "McLuhanism with Capitalist Characteristics." The medium (the net) is the message (freedom), both insist, but ideally the market and the modem have to work their respective magics simultaneously. There is something appealing about this vision, but it is deeply flawed. And viewing the future through this particular rose-colored lens can lead observers to misunderstand crises in Chinese-American affairs (and in cross-cultural communications), such as those generated by the recent spy-plane fiasco and the 1999 destruction by NATO bombs of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

What exactly is the neo-McLuhanite camp, and why place Clinton and Will inside it? Consider, first, a speech the then-President gave in March 2000 calling for permanent normal trade relations with China. Clinton invoked Earl Warren's claim that "liberty is the most contagious force in the world," then insisted that the "cell phone and cable modem" would help freedom flourish in the new century. "We know how much the Internet has changed America," Clinton said, "and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China." The Chinese government had "been trying to crack down on the Internet," he acknowledged, but this was like trying "to nail Jell-O to the wall."

Flash forward to a column Will wrote during the latest crisis, while the man the Chinese call Xiao Bushi (Little Bush) was proving (as a headline in the Guardian put it) that sorry really is the hardest word. Despite being troubled by Beijing's demand for an apology, the pundit saw hope on the horizon. Henry Kissinger had reported in glowing terms about the "proliferation of 'Internet cafes'" in China, and Will considered these "small businesses" to be "huge portents" of changes to come, since without a "monopoly of information," authoritarian governments collapse.

"Totalitarianism is rendered impossible, and perhaps even tyranny is rendered difficult," Will wrote, "by technologies that make nations porous to information." He then reminded his readers that "China already was becoming porous in 1989," when students there learned about massacres via e-mails sent to them from "American campuses where they had studied and made friends," and it has grown even more porous since. The official media might still try to "nationalize the public's consciousness," he concluded, but the web would undermine this.

Typically, neo-McLuhanite commentaries of this sort take three things for granted: first, that access to the Internet will not just make Chinese citizens more like us but also like us more. Second, that virtual globalization is tantamount to virtual Americanization, so the Internet can do for information what the Big Mac has done for cuisine. And last, that nationalism, at least in virulent forms, is a remnant ideology clung to only by older, less-plugged-in people out of step with the cosmopolitan dot-com generation.

So, what's wrong with this picture? Plenty--at least where Chinese-American conflicts are concerned. This struck me in 1999 (when I happened to be in China and witnessed anti-American protest spurred by the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade) and again this year.

The first mistaken neo-McLuhanite assumption is that when Chinese go onto the web to connect with foreign cultures, they naturally turn to American URLs. Sometimes they do, often they don't. In 1999, when I visited an Internet cafe in Beijing before the anti-American protests began, most of the youths I saw were hooked up to Japanese-style video games. After the demonstrations began, more patrons logged on to news sites, but as likely as not this would be www.serbia.com. Cultural globalization is never about one-way flows, though Americans often forget this, conveniently ignoring the fact that the world's cities are now cluttered not just with KFC franchises but also karaoke bars. American destinations provide some attractive options to netizens in search of adventure, but they are never the only places these globetrotters go.

A second problematic assumption is that visiting American websites will make Chinese doubt their government's propaganda. In the most emotional stages of recent crises, many US magazines, newspapers and on-line zines have showcased China-bashing Op-Eds and editorial cartoons that might well serve to confirm, not undermine, Beijing's rhetoric of victimization. They contain postings supporting the notion that for all our talk of the universality of human rights, we are not above being more outraged by the endangerment of US lives than by the loss of Chinese ones, and supporting the idea that Americans are far too prone to demonize and infantilize China. I actually hope, at certain moments, that my Chinese friends will stay away from the web. What good will it do them to see resurrections of Yellow Peril-type images of bloodthirsty dragons? Or to read the headline at least one paper used for George Will's recent column: "America Shouldn't Appease Its Adolescent Foe"?

Yet another problem with the neo-McLuhanite approach is that there is in fact never a clear line separating nationalists from netizens. There are plenty of plugged-in populists with jingoistic impulses in China (as anyone who has visited its chatrooms can attest). And the same goes for the United States (just visit www.RushLimbaugh.com). Nor does generation make the difference. Some of the nastiest anti-American cyberpostings on Chinese bulletin boards in 1999 came from educated youths. And Wang Wei, the young pilot downed in the brush with the US spy plane, has been described recently in the Chinese media as having traits we associate both with the global netizen (a regular surfer of the web and user of e-mail) and the fervent nationalist (ready to die for his homeland).

Last but not least, neo-McLuhanite rhapsodists often overlook the extent to which old and new media forms overlap and affect each other. Old forms of communication never die, they just get digital makeovers, and new media can easily be integrated into traditional political games. Witness the key role of an exchange of snail-mail letters between Wang Wei's wife and Xiao Bushi in the most recent Chinese-American crisis, the importance of which was magnified by both Chinese TV and CNN coverage. Or consider the use in the 1999 Chinese protests of a new form of wall poster: printouts from websites.

The neo-McLuhanites are certainly right about two things: China is changing dramatically, in part because of new forms of international communication and commerce, and the transformations will continue. But these changes have not and will not take simple and predictable forms. Markets and modems, in the era of the New World Disorder, push and pull people and countries in different directions, and the choices individuals and groups make when faced with novel challenges matter.

It seems fitting to end with an ironic question. Wasn't it Marxist analysts who used to be criticized--albeit sometimes unfairly--for insisting that History flows in a predetermined direction? I, for one, doubt that the new forms of virtual determinism will prove any better at predicting the future in this century than the materialist one spelled out by the author of Das Kapital did in the last one.

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Bill Clinton and George Will so rarely agree with each other that when they embrace the same position, we should be alarmed. This thought came to mind upon realizing that their stances on the Internet and China are interchangeable–despite Clinton’s favoring a softer political line than Will on Beijing. When it comes to the web, both espouse what might best be dubbed a neo-McLuhanite approach, or a form of “McLuhanism with Capitalist Characteristics.” The medium (the net) is the message (freedom), both insist, but ideally the market and the modem have to work their respective magics simultaneously. There is something appealing about this vision, but it is deeply flawed. And viewing the future through this particular rose-colored lens can lead observers to misunderstand crises in Chinese-American affairs (and in cross-cultural communications), such as those generated by the recent spy-plane fiasco and the 1999 destruction by NATO bombs of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade.

What exactly is the neo-McLuhanite camp, and why place Clinton and Will inside it? Consider, first, a speech the then-President gave in March 2000 calling for permanent normal trade relations with China. Clinton invoked Earl Warren’s claim that “liberty is the most contagious force in the world,” then insisted that the “cell phone and cable modem” would help freedom flourish in the new century. “We know how much the Internet has changed America,” Clinton said, “and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China.” The Chinese government had “been trying to crack down on the Internet,” he acknowledged, but this was like trying “to nail Jell-O to the wall.”

Flash forward to a column Will wrote during the latest crisis, while the man the Chinese call Xiao Bushi (Little Bush) was proving (as a headline in the Guardian put it) that sorry really is the hardest word. Despite being troubled by Beijing’s demand for an apology, the pundit saw hope on the horizon. Henry Kissinger had reported in glowing terms about the “proliferation of ‘Internet cafes'” in China, and Will considered these “small businesses” to be “huge portents” of changes to come, since without a “monopoly of information,” authoritarian governments collapse.

“Totalitarianism is rendered impossible, and perhaps even tyranny is rendered difficult,” Will wrote, “by technologies that make nations porous to information.” He then reminded his readers that “China already was becoming porous in 1989,” when students there learned about massacres via e-mails sent to them from “American campuses where they had studied and made friends,” and it has grown even more porous since. The official media might still try to “nationalize the public’s consciousness,” he concluded, but the web would undermine this.

Typically, neo-McLuhanite commentaries of this sort take three things for granted: first, that access to the Internet will not just make Chinese citizens more like us but also like us more. Second, that virtual globalization is tantamount to virtual Americanization, so the Internet can do for information what the Big Mac has done for cuisine. And last, that nationalism, at least in virulent forms, is a remnant ideology clung to only by older, less-plugged-in people out of step with the cosmopolitan dot-com generation.

So, what’s wrong with this picture? Plenty–at least where Chinese-American conflicts are concerned. This struck me in 1999 (when I happened to be in China and witnessed anti-American protest spurred by the US bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade) and again this year.

The first mistaken neo-McLuhanite assumption is that when Chinese go onto the web to connect with foreign cultures, they naturally turn to American URLs. Sometimes they do, often they don’t. In 1999, when I visited an Internet cafe in Beijing before the anti-American protests began, most of the youths I saw were hooked up to Japanese-style video games. After the demonstrations began, more patrons logged on to news sites, but as likely as not this would be www.serbia.com. Cultural globalization is never about one-way flows, though Americans often forget this, conveniently ignoring the fact that the world’s cities are now cluttered not just with KFC franchises but also karaoke bars. American destinations provide some attractive options to netizens in search of adventure, but they are never the only places these globetrotters go.

A second problematic assumption is that visiting American websites will make Chinese doubt their government’s propaganda. In the most emotional stages of recent crises, many US magazines, newspapers and on-line zines have showcased China-bashing Op-Eds and editorial cartoons that might well serve to confirm, not undermine, Beijing’s rhetoric of victimization. They contain postings supporting the notion that for all our talk of the universality of human rights, we are not above being more outraged by the endangerment of US lives than by the loss of Chinese ones, and supporting the idea that Americans are far too prone to demonize and infantilize China. I actually hope, at certain moments, that my Chinese friends will stay away from the web. What good will it do them to see resurrections of Yellow Peril-type images of bloodthirsty dragons? Or to read the headline at least one paper used for George Will’s recent column: “America Shouldn’t Appease Its Adolescent Foe”?

Yet another problem with the neo-McLuhanite approach is that there is in fact never a clear line separating nationalists from netizens. There are plenty of plugged-in populists with jingoistic impulses in China (as anyone who has visited its chatrooms can attest). And the same goes for the United States (just visit www.RushLimbaugh.com). Nor does generation make the difference. Some of the nastiest anti-American cyberpostings on Chinese bulletin boards in 1999 came from educated youths. And Wang Wei, the young pilot downed in the brush with the US spy plane, has been described recently in the Chinese media as having traits we associate both with the global netizen (a regular surfer of the web and user of e-mail) and the fervent nationalist (ready to die for his homeland).

Last but not least, neo-McLuhanite rhapsodists often overlook the extent to which old and new media forms overlap and affect each other. Old forms of communication never die, they just get digital makeovers, and new media can easily be integrated into traditional political games. Witness the key role of an exchange of snail-mail letters between Wang Wei’s wife and Xiao Bushi in the most recent Chinese-American crisis, the importance of which was magnified by both Chinese TV and CNN coverage. Or consider the use in the 1999 Chinese protests of a new form of wall poster: printouts from websites.

The neo-McLuhanites are certainly right about two things: China is changing dramatically, in part because of new forms of international communication and commerce, and the transformations will continue. But these changes have not and will not take simple and predictable forms. Markets and modems, in the era of the New World Disorder, push and pull people and countries in different directions, and the choices individuals and groups make when faced with novel challenges matter.

It seems fitting to end with an ironic question. Wasn’t it Marxist analysts who used to be criticized–albeit sometimes unfairly–for insisting that History flows in a predetermined direction? I, for one, doubt that the new forms of virtual determinism will prove any better at predicting the future in this century than the materialist one spelled out by the author of Das Kapital did in the last one.